


Rust & Stardust

by ChromeHoplite, CimmerianShade



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Adult Ciel Phantomhive, Autophagia, BAMF Sebastian, Bounties, Cults, Dark, Demon Sebastian Michaelis, Demonology, Explicit Sexual Content, Graphic Violence, Hacktivism, Hostage Situations, Hungry Sebastian, M/M, Modern AU, Past Life Memories, References to Canon, Reincarnation, Slow Burn, demon masturbation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-01-10 19:37:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 43,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18414506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChromeHoplite/pseuds/ChromeHoplite, https://archiveofourown.org/users/CimmerianShade/pseuds/CimmerianShade
Summary: Regardless of one's station in life: lowly reaper or vengeful earl, death eventually comes for everyone. For those who have incited the wrath of Sebastian Michaelis, that death will be merciless and excruciating.And while people and powerful entities eventually expire, an unfulfilled covenant does not. Its blasphemic energy grows stronger, clinging to the rust of the past and the stardust it was destined to become. It stalks and bides like a starved predator, until such a time as demon and lord reawaken.Chaos like the world undone... something loathsome this way comes.





	1. Singularity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Wait, a fucking demon?” the rookie snorted, his face twisted in biased disgust. “The stars are getting bent out of shape over some _demon_?
> 
> The siren pinched the bridge of her nose. “That fucking demon… Listen Max, it’s bad enough that collapsars are the most deadly force in the universe, but do you know what’s worse than a black hole?”
> 
> “Two of them?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  
> 
>   
> 
> 
> Title: Singularity  
> By: [T-stray](https://t-stray.tumblr.com)  
> Paintool Sai and ClipStudioPaint  
> Character (c) Yana Toboso  
> 
> 
>   
> Music inspiration: [Enraged by The Unguided](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DaFA1q7cvc)  
> 

“He’s awake.” 

“How do you know?” 

“Are you blind? Didn’t you see the sky tonight? It’s terrified.” 

“Of what?”

They should have been able to hear the celestial spectacle from the penthouse suite, even through the sealed floor to ceiling windows; but the sky was silent, as if holding its breath in incomprehensible dread. The firmament went pale in the depth of the darkest night of the year, colour draining from its zenith and rendering it the colour of dying embers. The moon seen through the skylight overhead bulged like an eye unable to blink, and under their feet, they could feel the fabric of the universe pulse, like blood rushing into a pounding heart readying itself for fight _and_ flight. 

The youngest among them, a newly instated reaper swallowed, breaking the muted stillness and whatever restraint the sky had concocted by way of self-preservation. But it seemed that not all stars had this same instinct. Occasionally, some of them blinked out of existence in a swift burst of light, with afterimages fading like the pop of a flashbulb. Their systematic suicide left a graveyard of ghostly orbs in the sky that reflected in the disbelieving, phosphorescent eyes of the supernatural beings bearing witness of the night’s violence. 

Ludger exhaled shakily, blowing smoke from his mouth on the window before him and fogging it up. He tapped his cigarette with his index finger and let the ashes drop to the marble floor, then wiped the befogged glass surface to look outside again. A fly struggled between the double panes, wings faltering, thrashing and thumping about in vain trying to find an exit. Ludger couldn’t help but compare their current situations and tried to ignore the necropolis of larvae, antennae, segmented legs and threadbare prismatic wings that accumulated at the bottom. 

“Not of _what_...” Ludger said pulling another drag of his cigarette, “of _whom_.” 

“I don’t…” the rookie started, looking confused, and finally rose from his chair by the opulent fireplace with a resigned grunt. 

“Death is coming for us all, that’s just the way it works!” the siren next to him snapped. “The stars know this, planets know this, even humans, as useless as they are, know this!” Her nerves were frayed to tatters by what they’d all been observing. With trembling hands, she downed the remainder of her scotch, followed by the three cubes at the bottom of the tumbler and then the glass itself. Her jagged teeth ground the silica effortlessly, as it would the healthy bones of her victims. “They know it but they don’t accept it. You know why? They’re afraid. Either they’re afraid of the uncertainty that comes after death or the pain that comes with it; and what’s woken up just now promises both!”

Ludger paced the office, rubbing the back of his neck with enough pressure to irritate the skin raw. “Imagine being devoured. Mutilated and mangled. Losing all sense of what you are, forever trapped in an inexplicable void.” 

“I still don’t get it,” the young reaper argued. “Are we talking about a black hole or a supernatural being here? Because the nearest black hole is like,” he huffed and his eyes rolled up either in an effort to calculate or to remember something, “three thousand light years away. So what’s the big deal?” 

The mantle held a rotary telephone and Ludger picked up its ornately brass receiver in exigence, positioned it between his head and shoulder and rapped its cradle surreptitiously trying to find a dial tone. _Dead_. “Damn it,” he cursed, sighing gravely. Not having the will to hold onto the handset, much less return it to the cradle, he simply let it dangle on the cable a moment before its disproportionate weight pulled the whole apparatus down. It fell in a soundless clatter, the base shattering, the dial cracking its face and the coils and springs bounced under the nearby wingback chairs dramatically. “We’re not talking about _a_ black hole. This is _THE_ black hole. Mr. Singularity himself.” 

“Some centuries ago, he went by the name Sebastian Michaelis,” the siren pointed out, her eyes hypnotically following the pendulum on the grandfather clock, mentally tabulating how much time had passed since they first noticed the disturbance. _Just barely over a minute. Not long now._

“Wait, a fucking demon?” the rookie snorted, his face twisted in biased disgust. “The stars are getting bent out of shape over some _demon_?

The siren pinched the bridge of her nose. “That fucking demon… Listen Max, it’s bad enough that collapsars are the most deadly force in the universe, but do you know what’s worse than a black hole?”

“Two of them?”

The siren’s hand stilled the clock pendulum in the middle of its oscillatory period, then broke it off completely as if it would actually stop time for them. Out of sheer contempt, she threw it at the rookie and it grazed his cheek, leaving a faint pink mark upon his face. “No you dumb shit, a rogue one. One that doesn’t follow established, predictable, aeonian rules. Do you have any idea what that bastard did to your kind? During the Great Plague of London, not even your precious British Dispatch could keep up with the sheer amount of souls there were to collect. And then this well-dressed wanker showed up, somehow got his hands on a third of the souls and do you know what he did?”

Max stared blankly as both siren and senior reaper exchanged a knowing look. When he answered, his tone was one of polite disinterest. “He ate them.”

It was Ludger who answered, and there was no hiding the derisive bite to his tone. The room felt tighter and hotter the longer they did nothing. He fingered his collar to loosen it, to give his throat more room to swallow since he was doing so more frequently. “You would think so, wouldn’t you? Since demons are such insatiable magots... No, he held them high over our heads without so much as touching them so everyone could see. They just floated there, and then suddenly, his fingers flexed and they were compressed, _thousands_ of them, into a sphere smaller than an egg, but brighter than Alpha Centuri. He smelled them for showmanship, nose twitching, nostrils flaring, drinking in their scent. His eyes rolled back; it was an invitation for anyone with balls big enough willing to take a shot at him while he was ‘distracted’.” Ludger made air quotations around the word. “When no one was stupid enough, he lit the souls like a supernova. We could hear them screaming when he smothered the blaze in his fist. Then whatever was left of them, just oozed from between his fingers and stained the earth. He cast their remains aside as if they were nothing. Said he didn’t want to waste his appetite; that something better was coming.”

A ripple of revulsion from stomach to mouth had Ludger bringing the wastebasket by the fireplace to his pallid face. He dry heaved into it and the siren stepped back from him and towards the large wall-length aquarium where she soothed her anxious, heated skin, careful not to catch her reflection. A large creature thumped against her from behind the glass and she got out of the way, having obscured its view from the outside. 

“This is a devil of focus, has his many eyes on the prize,” she said over Ludger's continued retching. “His touch is an event horizon; anyone who falls prey is sucked in by his charm, by his efficiency. And even knowing this… even after seeing what he did with those souls, someone saw it fit to ruin the meal Sebastian Michaelis spent years preparing, spent centuries waiting for, and at the very last minute. You’d be pretty pissed off too.”

“They did this on purpose?” Max asked, incredulous as the full extent and severity of the situation began to dawn on him. He finally approached the window the way one would a Black Shuck: slowly and with a hand out. He had to see it for himself. “Are you for real? Grell said you would put me through some kind of initiation… but this is a little much, isn't it?”

Having successfully emptied his stomach of its contents, Ludger's head subsequently came up and he nodded solemnly. “You think we would joke about _this_?”

The rookie looked up at the murky sky and he recoiled as it abruptly stared back at him. It had gone from a twisted, sallow corpse to a slate, sinister face with too many eyes, each of which had been born of a dead or dying astre. They moved as one, peering from side to side over London, in search of prey. 

They found it. 

He shrunk from the penetrating glare, froze as each and every crimson orb bore into him, reading him, stripping away every secret he had been bound to keep until his soul lay bare and exposed before the quivering glass. The sound of his heartbeat thrashed in his ears and he was rooted to the spot even though every instinct he had was screaming at him to take shelter. 

It was only when the siren forcefully slid the vertical blinds across the window, that Max's jaw unclenched enough to speak. “Even if he's back, we're safe, right? We’re literally in a supernatural hotel, full of some of the most powerful beings in the world, where it’s strictly prohibited to conduct business. That rule… it's decisively and ruthlessly reinforced! We have nothing to worry about… ” 

“Have you listened to a word we’ve said?” Ludger spat, leaning over towards the nearby circular table, grasping his death scythe. With a nod of his head, he suggested his apprentice do the same. 

“Why can't we just give him back his food?” Max asked, avoiding their eyes, not really expecting the answer he wanted to hear, but not knowing what else to say. He weighed his weapon, which had reaped a dozen souls at most, between both hands. The electric bulb auger that circumvolved at the far end, as if readying itself for a fight.

The siren's maniacal laughter echoed through the penthouse and the kelpie behind her sloshed water over its aquarium, flooding the tiles and bathing them in entrails and discoloured liquid. “You're an embarrassment to your kind,” she sneered, “giving up a soul like that to save your own skin.”

“That child made a deal with the devil. By all accounts, his soul should not be any of our concern anymore,” Ludger barked, taking inventory of any and all possible exits out of the room. There were three: the entrance, the trap door in the ceiling, and the window. Only one had a deadbolt, and that would never keep _Him_ out. 

“Child?” Max challenged. “A child?” He wasn't much older than one himself; he’d been sixteen when he’d felt the kiss of blades over his wrists in a graceless attempt to prove a point. It had been a shock to him that nobody had really given a damn. Former contempt swelled in his body and he practically swore his indifference. “Fine. Give him the child, and have done with it.” 

“Can’t. Died about a hundred and twenty years ago, didn't he?” the siren said, sharpening her lethal claws between her splintery teeth. “Was stolen right from the demon’s maw… or so it's said. Nobody's sure what really happened. There are so many rumours: witches from Germany, revenant conspiracies, others presume it was Death itself. I think even the Queen got dragged into it. That's why we’re _all_ fucked.”

“Then check his cinematic record! You’ll be able to see it there!”

The pressure was getting to the rookie. Ludger saw Max’s reflection in the aquarium as he tugged at the baby-fine roots of his pixied hair with his free hand. Useless tears filled his fluorescent eyes and slid down his face. He must have finally made the connection, Ludger thought; if reapers worked in the employ of Death, and were essentially dead themselves, then why should they have anything to fear? Unless what waited for them was a fate worse than being permanently bereft?

The senior reaper burst out into raucous laughter; there really wasn’t a worse time in all of his hundred and eight years to do it. But it was infectious enough that the siren joined in, as did the kelpie in her tank. His face turned a deeper shade of red as his anxiety grew that he could barely argue Max’s suggestion. “The record was torn to shreds and scattered.” 

“Who has the power to do that!” Max interjected, an expletive rather than a question. 

“I haven’t even told you the best part yet,” Ludger wiped a stray tear from the corner of his eye with his sleeve. “A piece of that boy’s cinematic record was inserted into every new reaper that joined Dispatch since the end of the Victorian era.” 

Tiny hairs on Max’s whole body stood to attention. His pulse beat visibly under his skin like it wanted out of his deathtrap of a body. “H-how? Who can?”

“The same being who had the power to shatter it, I guess…” 

“I must not have it,” he cried out triumphantly, having finally caught the contagion of Ludger’s half-crazed laughter. “I can’t remember this kid at all. I would remember him if part of his life had been etched into me.” 

“Don’t you though? Don’t you remember Earl Ciel Phantomhive?” the Siren taunted, glad he belatedly shared their dread. They would be harder to kill if they fought together, but that still wasn’t saying much; Michaelis would have about the same level of difficulty in extinguishing them as a precocious child blowing out the candles on their birthday cake. And probably a lot more fun. 

At the mere mention of the name, Max’s watery eyes went wide. He saw it unfold before him, the stored memory pulled from his core like pitiful whines in a heated kiss. Thin wisps of vaporous breath spilled from his mouth and flit across the floor, taking shape and manifesting as a set of sumptuous double doors that stretched the height of the penthouse. They separated in a swift movement, assisted by a large elegantly gloved hand. The young reaper’s heart thud madly, and the smoke darkened and took on the aspect of a crowd. He stood on the tips of his toes, craning his neck and peering over the shadowed individuals to see whom the doors had admitted when at once the bodies parted. 

There in their midst, stood a haughty young man in all the dignified trappings of nobility. He was de rigueur, head to toe in wistful monochromatic hues with attire that fit his delicate frame only to enhance it. His hat remained balanced on his head, which he held high and proud, and as he took the first few steps into the room in his heeled shoes, a short bustled train flowed behind him. 

His high pedigree was obvious in the way he carried himself, even relying on his ornate cane as he did. His beauty was not typical of boys his age; it belonged to someone who had lived much longer and had seen more than a child of thirteen should have. It was there in his unflinching confidence, in his bleak resignation of having to make an appearance at whatever function he was attending. 

More than anything, Ciel Phantomhive’s mystique lay in his unassuming danger. Like the plant aconitum, he was lovely, and yet the ruthless expression he wore displayed the callous cruelty of which he was capable. It was probably why the attendants backed away from him and gave him such a wide berth for so small an heir. Or it might not have had anything to do with the Queen’s Watchdog at all, but the sinisterly smirking butler who joined him, following like a deadly shadow on his heels, vowing retribution should anyone attempt to bedevil his young master. 

Max gasped and for a moment, the Earl paralyzed him with the narrowing of his bright blue eye, before dissipating like a moon halo.

“Th-That’s _in_ me?” the reaper tantrumed, stumbling back until he was up against the vertical blinds. “Get it the fuck out! I don’t want those memories!” 

“There’s only one way to get it out, Sweetheart, and you won’t like it,” the siren said. She winced at the feel of her claws digging into her palms. 

“Well, I’m not waiting around. I didn’t consent to this,” Max complained, using the blunt head of his auger to pierce the window. He failed; but a fine network of brittle nerves spread across the pane, making it impossible to see the night sky anymore. 

Ludger’s hand shot out, gripping the young reaper’s arm to stop him when he re-attempted to break through the window. “What’re you going to do? Think jumping will make a difference? Nobody needed your consent, you millennial trash; death isn’t a democracy, and it’s never fair, you should know this after your training! Now reaper up and…”

But exactly what advice the elder of the two was going to give was lost somewhere in his throat, as the glass righted itself before their eyes. It seemed to reinforce itself, to thicken by centimetres, caging them behind a glossy resinous layer. 

Escape was futile; they knew that now. Knew it with more certainty than the sun actually rising tomorrow. Nobody was coming to save them and all they had was to wait to be delivered into the hands of a chaos that could rival the creation of the universe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge thanks to @teasmudge and @gocaitycat for their beta! <3


	2. Almagestum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Besides, he had no time for bygone eras, only appetite and acrimony. Starvation and satiation -- through revenge, naturally. An eye, for an eye, for an eye, for an eye, ad infinitum.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>    
> 
> 
> Title: Almagestum  
> By: [T-stray](https://t-stray.tumblr.com)  
> Paintool Sai and ClipStudioPaint  
> Character (c) Yana Toboso  
> 
> 
>   
> Music inspiration: [Soul Society by Kamelot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDubchjrz1I)  
> 

A figure, darker than the bleakness of [Boötes void](https://i.redd.it/zm225n45bz421.jpg), strode purposefully across Westminster bridge, devouring the light from the lampposts as he passed. Photons broke free of their globed entrapment and followed him in loose, tendrillar filaments that were absorbed into his person. Behind him it was pitch black, a world thrown into a nyctophobe’s nightmare where the dreamer could not wake. Even the ever-watchful [London Eye](https://www.londonbeep.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/london_eye_pictures_at_night_9.jpg) had gone temporarily blind; it was better that way -- no witnesses. 

Before him, on the north bank of the Thames, the lights shuddered in anticipation of erasure. Clouds smeared the sky and compromised the moonglade upon the river, making the water look like ink. Had his presence not been inferred through its interaction with the visible light drawn to him, nobody could see him coming. 

But he saw everything.

His eyes, like disruptors of cosmic order and time-space fabric, peered everywhere at once, hundreds of them in circular black shadows defined by jets of fiery plasma. Some flashed five miles away to Abbey Road, where he picked up the sound of long-dead gramophone echoes. At least a dozen eyes glinted with interest towards the west, captivated by the Scottish Wildcat enclosure at the Battersea zoo. Unconsciously, his feet carried him to the bridge’s stone parapet, lured by the carnivorous beauty, when his attention was diverted once more. 

Paces away, the [Palace of Westminster](http://www.freeimageslive.com/galleries/buildings/london/pics/palace_of_westminster.jpg) stood proud in all its revived gothic sophistication, stretched imperiously along the shore like open arms, welcoming back its most devoted sycophant home. His gash of a mouth tore itself open and the corners twitched and lifted as he bowed low at the waist, his right arm drawn towards his back and his left pressed across his abdomen. Big Ben held his peace for once and the entity took a moment to baffle at its irony. Soon enough, silence would befall all those who denied him his inquisition. 

Having paid his respects, and apologized for having left without a proper farewell, he straightened again to taste the air and follow the traitorous tang northbound. As he advanced, he contemplated the silence and emptiness of Great George Street and the Thames itself. The river had once been a source of artistic inspiration, she was a muse onto herself, invoking Chaucer and Shakespeare, Conan Doyle and even masters Monet and Turner who had been so enchanted by her many moods and colours. Where were the jilted poets now? The thieves who thrived in night’s obscurity?

The former were no doubt hiding in blind alleys, squinting to conceal the whites of their eyes as they watched him pass, hoping to gain the element of surprise and take him unaware. 

Gormless humans, no better than their neanderthalian predecessors. Didn’t they know that he could hear their boorish footfalls along the asphalt like horsemen announcing the apocalypse? That the blood coursing through their veins and the hearts hammering against their ribs disturbed the air around them? 

And as their pulses quickened, intensifying the stench of their petty greed, he was annoyed by their audacity. Didn’t they know who he was? How many like them he had slain, easily dispatched in the night while his young master slept soundly in his four-poster, blissfully unaware? 

Thinking about him twisted the entity’s stomach, exacerbating his ache and hostility in equal measure. He shook his head and refocused his attention on the meagre distortions London had undergone in his absence. Shapeless boxes for cars lined Parliament street, concrete had usurped the former lush greenery, and new wars had been fought -- as evidenced by the Cenotaph erected in the center of the avenue. Snarling derisively under his breath, he chided himself: how foolish to get caught up in the past; only those walking flesh-sacks tripped on what lay behind them. And given they all ended up as compost eventually, retrospection never amounted to anything. 

Besides, he had no time for bygone eras, only appetite and acrimony. Starvation and satiation -- through revenge, naturally. An eye, for an eye, for an eye, for an eye, _ad infinitum_. 

And he had no trouble starting with the four that trailed him. 

He had just passed a memorial that served as a tribute to some Earl Haig, when one of the curs whispered his intentions to the other some twenty paces back. The entity took an exasperated breath that pulled the oxygen in from his surroundings, wilting whole trees that sparsely lined the road. Footsteps faltered behind him and a high-pitched, wheezing sound caused by disrupted airflow reverberated in canon. 

Without so much as looking in their direction, tendrils shot out in a blurred eclipse, wrapping around the vermin at ankles and thighs and swinging them forward. They arced through the gloom with a graceful elan and a distinctive crunch of bones. Both bodies were hurled at either side of Parliament Street, one hitting the [Banqueting House](https://renstoriadellarte.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/3257055570_b14d1d5a52.jpg) and the second crashing hard against the ionic column of the [Dover House](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_House#/media/File:Scotland_Office,_Dover_House,_Whitehall_01.jpg). The column shattered as if it were glass rather than marble, owing to the sheer force with which the body had collided. Tendrils disentangled themselves from the now limp corpse-like fingers having soiled themselves on contagion. Great slabs of alabaster and shards of calcite rained over the first casualty of the evening and buried him; it was more than he deserved, the mound resembled the ancient cairns usually reserved for fallen heroes in combat. 

Across the street, he felt a vague sensation, a useless hacking. It drew his attention to the ghostly pale figure thrashing against his tendrillar restraints. The entity chuckled low in his throat, but the menacing, sardonic sound carried on the wind which had abruptly changed directions to do just that. With the tables now sufficiently turned, he stalked the inverse body dangling precariously from a singular broken leg which bent at an unnatural angle. 

The miscreant shook his head in a fast, back-and-forth sweep of denial, refusing to believe what he was seeing. “No… I… He…” the meatsack blithered in fragments. He let rip a confused, strangled scream that only grew stronger the more the entity approached. 

In the span of a handful of horror-stricken heartbeats, the entity went from depthless mass to something almost human. Almost, because despite a man’s form materializing, it retained a fiendish mouth, gnashing with vicious canines. The rest of him was tall and ironically muscled like a god, with a solid torso, broad chest and wide shoulders. Sleek black shoes manifested with every silent step that echoed, closing the distance between Absolute Being and meaningless spec of dust. Long, strong legs effortlessly overstepped the iron-wrought gate adorning the front of the historic building, as well-cut tailored trousers knitted themselves into existence. 

By the time he stood face to face with the degenerate who still hung wrong side up, only two of his many searing eyes could be seen. He took a moment to admire himself in the reflection of the thief’s petrified orbs, then squared his shoulders and stiffly straightened the lapels of his tailcoat with his large, black-gloved hands. Something was still off; there was a lingering animalistic aura in his wayward, dishevelled mane and an ineffable exhaustion in the deep bags under his eyes. But it would right itself eventually -- it always did.

_How painfully dull._

He’d been told by his young master not to toy with his food on countless occasions, but in this instance, he had no intention of devouring such a common plague sore, even as hungry as he was; so why not _play_? 

Keeping his gaze upon the thief’s face, the entity’s hand lowered itself to the glinting silver piece at the foot of the building’s pilaster, just below the body. Without looking at it, he knew the blade had been rendered useless by his demonic aura; it had distorted, warped and rusted beyond use. He tsked in a most disapproving tone and shook his head. “This won’t do,” he taunted, bringing the knife to his mouth and dragging it languidly between his lips along the once sharp edge. A black substance oozed from the right corner of this upturned lips, but was immediately blotted by a handkerchief woven in blue silk whose crest bore the calligraphed letters _S_ and _M_.

“There,” he sighed with false satisfaction, thrusting the renewed weapon into the thief’s trembling hand and curling the resistant fingers around it snugly. It should give his would-be assailant the impression of having a fighting chance. “It is quite unchivalrous to attack a gentleman while his back is turned, but I’m willing to excuse this lack of courtesy in favour of a few answers.” 

The thief balked, holding his pathetic dagger before his feeble, broken body. He shook it like a maraca, though it was his chattering teeth that were responsible for the discordant music that filled the space between them. “What the... Y-you’re not a soddin’ gentleman! You’re not even…”

The gentleman’s arms crossed over his chest imperiously, his right index finger trapping absently on his left bicep, “Human? Yes, I’m quite glad you noticed. [I would loathe to be mistaken as one of you](https://www.dropbox.com/s/uj5q8g8hws8i69s/vvvvvv.png?dl=0). Now then, these answers…” 

The degenerate swung his blade wildly. “Go fuck yourself!” he spat, the saliva not making it anywhere near the aberration, instead, it drooled along the tip of his crooked nose and onto the ground. 

“Mmn… as enjoyable as that sounds, I do have some rather important business to attend to. Perhaps you need some coaxing?” he cocked his head, feigning concern. The thief’s arm bent against his will, resting the blade on his bobbing Adam’s apple; the edge birthed a spine of serrated teeth against the sensitive skin. “I will remind you that it was in this very spot that King Charles the First was beheaded for raising taxes, however long ago. Would you like to relive his agony?” 

The louse shook his head and the blade left faint pink marks and tiny crimson rivulets upon his gullet. Panic swam in his eyes and hitched his breath.

“I was hoping you would see it my way. Now then, who rules this land?” 

“T-Theresa May,” the thief stuttered, then pleaded, “lemme go now.” 

“Such an uncultivated way to address your monarch,” the gentleman sneered, lifting a single eyebrow in challenge. The common decree was an affront to his aristocratic aesthetic. He searched the periodicals of his mind, going as far back to when the Celts governed the small island. _Theresa_ was not a royal name in the English lineage; he knew Theresa of Portugal certainly, Maria Theresa of Hungary and Bohemia as well. 

The thief interrupted his musings, huffing as his lower organs compressed against his lungs, denying them the necessary space to absorb sufficient oxygen. “N-no. That’s the P-prime Minister. The queen is Elizabeth… the Second.” 

“Oh my, I _have_ been out a while, haven’t I?” the gentleman asked rhetorically, carding his long fingers through the tangles of his onyx hair into something more presentable. Traces of broken nebulae fell onto his broad shoulders and was consumed instantly by the dark of his tailcoat. “What year is it?”

“Two-thousand nineteen.”

With that, the gentleman turned away from the human pustule, concealing from the dangling figure the split-second disappointment that coloured his face. As he ventured onto Horse Guards Avenue, in the direction of the inexplicable pull he’d felt upon waking, he heard the slash of carbon steel against a pooling neck of blood, caught the static of the spill as it sloshed onto the concrete and the vibrations under his feet as the head hit first and the broken body crumpled over it. Their work done, the tendrils gathered themselves into him, disappearing into obscurity. 

The past called out to him, beckoned him like a seductive mistress, exposed and eager, curling her finger at him. He could taste it on his tongue like bergamot and greedy lips stained with cocoa and fine powdered sugar. Those who claimed it was dead were wrong; the past was no more lifeless than the stars who bathed his darkness overhead, it simply took time for their light to breach that distance. Victorian England was not time immemorial and he would surely recover from this fugue. 

Like stars, humans were born, and ultimately died. Some faded, while others went out with a bang; yet in the end, they all succumbed to their mortality. His young master might be gone, but those who had answers still lingered, he _felt them_ as surely as the gnawing hunger that corroded his core. If he had consumed the earl, he would have been glutted beyond what was acceptable for his refined aesthetic. Instead, he woke in this manner, delirious with deprivation and rage; something had gone wrong, he’d not fed and he’d not succeeded in his own revenge, that much was obvious. 

His feet carried him to 2 Whitehall Court, a block of luxury residential apartments modelled on a French chateau, that had amounted, in his incomplete memory, to nothing short of a pyramid scheme. In two thousand nineteen, however, it seemed to have been converted to an ostentatious hotel. 

He approached wordlessly and was regarded by the building’s doormen, both clad in classic grey suits, white shirts, black ties and top hats. The one on the right narrowed his eyes suspiciously and had an uncanny air about him. Regardless, both remained mute as he stood sentinel, gazing upward at the hotel. No, not sentinel -- that implied he was there to protect; that job was long done. If anything, this was a reconnaissance mission of the most hostile kind. 

A bitter gale swept the narrow street like a wind tunnel and both doormen ducked their heads, holding on to their hats to shield themselves from the cold. The gentleman was motionless, not giving any evidence of being affected by the elements as they were. In fact, with their heads cocked thus, both of them noticed the thin, compact sheet of snow that had melted beneath the new arrival’s polished shoes. They could hardly miss the wave of ire that pulsed, radiating from him, pushing the crystalline powder away from the outline of his footwear; it blew out circumferentially, at least a meter in a distinct appearance of a [spiral galaxy](https://mk0astronomynow9oh6g.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/NGC6814_1280x1280.jpg), giving his otherworldliness away. 

“Welcome,” the doorman on the left finally intonated and smiled, albeit belatedly. He opened the door with a flourish and heat rushed out with the usual stench that clung to new money. 

The gentleman read the sign over the double oak doors, [The Royal Horseguards](https://www.christinascucina.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_8191-768x563.jpg), and disregarded it haughtily, refusing the invitation to enter. The abnegation worked as a trigger, prompting a new name to etch itself atop the first in rune-like letters: ‘ _The Naberius_ ’. 

He gave a casual shake of the head and the whites of his eyes emerged as the fire rolled all the way back. “No. Surely not.” His derisive snort was less than proper for an aristocrat and drew the attention of both doormen. He shrugged, waiting for one of them to deliver a punchline that never came. This was clearly some kind of multi-faceted farce; what better way to remind him of his roots, the world to which he’d been resentfully tethered, than to name this monstrosity of a building after the twenty-fourth Solomonic spirit that restored lost dignities and honours? What a delicious twist of irony. It’s as if the world had stood still in anticipation of his return, waiting for him to claim what was rightfully his. 

Lightning flickered across the sky and the cloying scent of night-blooming jasmine filled the air. Beneath their feet, a purring rumble vibrated the ground and the mundane street withdrew from view, seeming to sink as they rose higher towards the heavens upon a mountain of Genesiac proportions. The doors lengthened, towering before him. The solid wooden entrance was replaced by a bi-folding door engraved with a resplendent three-headed golden borzoi on one side, and a majestic three-headed titanium raven on the other.

A pair of Brazen altars broke from the flanking flower pots, each with violet licking flames. These made the gleaming metal idols shine brighter, casting shadows upon the gentleman’s ever-evolving anthropomorphic features. They also illuminated the Solomonic seals engraved upon the flesh of the newly-erupted pillars that climbed as high as the twenty stories the hotel had been concealing to human eyes. Each sigil was accounted for with a preciseness that could not have been exacted by a mortal; this was a labour of reverence, rather than one of enslavement. It was a true testament to their hard-won freedom and his insurgent legacy. 

The once suspicious doorman approached him and gave him a slight bow. He did not seem at all moved by the hotel’s transformation, and when his eyes came up again, repugnant in their depths, the gentleman knew why. 

“If you think _I_ look bad, you should look in the mirror,” the sloucher mocked, orbs like runny yolks. He pushed the long hair suddenly spilling from his top hat from his face, trying to get a better read as to whom was presenting themselves at The Naberius on a night where the nerviest supernatural beings had fled. 

The gentleman smirked, an expression that deeply contrasted the ape-like monster’s, whose face was twisted in concentration and confusion. _Poor little malignant yokai_ , he thought, _gifted with the curse of telepathy and forced into this menial labour for it. When was the last time he’d been challenged? It would be a great dishonour should his kind discover that he had not been able to fulfill the duty for which he’d been born._

“Let me in, [Satori](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satori_\(folklore\)#/media/File:SekienSatori.jpg), and no one need know of your impotent failure,” the gentleman compromised simply out of courtesy. 

“I… I know _who_ you are, but I can’t confirm it,” the satori grumbled, tearing his eyes away from the gentleman. His inherited skill had been rebuffed and he now felt it transgress upon himself. Although his own method was one of subtlety, one which most did not perceive, this demon made sure he was keenly aware that he was being violated and most painfully. 

Thin wisps of icy blackness cradled the satori’s face in a fierce grip that shattered the hinge of his jaws. His knees buckled and he whined, forced to look up at the lips tilted in a devastating smile. They did not move as a clear message resonated inside of the satori’s mind. “Your tiny cranium cannot comprehend who I am. Now stand aside. You might possess some powers, but you are by no means immortal.” As if to make his intentions clear, the demon turned the satori’s head towards the thousand or so steep stone steps that had been cut into the side of the mountain. The London road would be barely visible to a weaker being than himself. 

A shudder ran through the humanoid’s body as he conceded in a garbled voice. “V-very well. I cannot open the doors myself. You must do that by way of a telepathic password.” If he were more courageous and had the function of his jaw, the satori would have smirked. He knew well that demons did not possess the emotional range to deactivate the lock; it was a measure put in place at The Naberius to keep them out. “Take my hand,” he offered, already mourning the bones in his fingers as he extended his right ones to the demon, and wrapped his left ones around the long vertical bar that acted as a handle, “and think of _lorn_.”

The demon leered nonchalantly into the shallow pools of sick that the satori used for eyes and visualized the adjective the yokai had recited. 

_Lorn. A four-letter word. Like lord, star, soul, but not as sweet. Not as delicious. Bitter. A deep sound. Heavy on the tongue._

He could taste it there, the contempt of the word souring his sluggish palate. He shuddered inside the cramped confines of his suit and pressed on since nothing of consequence had occurred. 

_Lorn. From **forlorn**. _

_Anglo-Saxon. Morally lost._

_Old English: **forlese**. To lose utterly. For-lese. Lese. Lose, loss, less…_

Loss? A collapsar was not in any measure to feel loss! It absorbed everything in its path: galaxies, light, even spacetime! What would _he_ know about loss? And yet, it had dogged his master constantly in life, in love and in his most cherished literary pieces. 

_Lorn. Shakespeare’s Tempest. ‘To make cold nymphs chaste crown; and thy broom-groves, Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves, being lass-lorn.’_

_No._

_Eugenia de Acton’s A Tale Without a Title? ‘A star-lorn sky’?_

_Closer._

_Milton? ‘Sweet Echo, sweetest Nymph that liv’st unseen, Within thy airy shell, By slow Meander’s margen green, And in the violet imbroider’d vale, Where the love-lorn Nightingale, Nightly to thee her sad, Song mourneth well.’_

_No._

_Not love._

_Mourning._

_Loss._

_Abandon._

_Failure._

_A flicker of a hand reaching out._

_A hand reaching out, covered in blood._

_A lifeless hand reaching out, covered in blood._

_A lifeless hand adorned with a blue sapphire on the thumb, reaching out, covered in blood._

__Failure? Him? Sebastian Michaelis?_ _

_Inconceivable. Impossible._

_Ruin._

_Lorn._

A snarl broke through Sebastian’s alabaster teeth, a foul sound that rattled the windows at least eight stories up. Reflexively, his hand gripped the satori’s fingers, wringing them with the speed of a snapping whip. They went limp, the bones inside crushed into fine ossein dust. For the demon, the wash of raw, potent anguish did not dissolve as quickly as it had surged; rather, in its wake, it left a vacuous ache with which he was little familiar. It took him off guard, but no more than the doorman, who gasped once he had finished screaming, as the door to the Naberius hissed open. 

Sebastian entered without a backward glance, walked in as if he owned the palatial hotel; he might as well have, given its namesake. He unbuttoned his suit jacket just as any gentleman would, and took in the sight of utmost decadence and nostalgia that met him. It was as though the supernatural establishment had been constructed to stoke the fires of his hunger. 

Mozart’s [Lacrimosa](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1-TrAvp_xs) played softly in the background, conjuring an inauspicious mood. And though the lobby was fitted with several multi-tiered chandeliers, it was the starlight that filtered into the opulent room, casting a sweven glow by way of floor to ceiling stained glass windows that illuminated it. Upon the windows, set in an ocean blue glass mosaic was a pearly, elegant eight-pointed star bound infinitely in the protection of a circle, not unlike the one burned into the flesh of his gloved hand. 

Sebastian followed the hypnotic stream of light that unnaturally refracted upwards instead of down, pulling his attention towards the sky. Overhead, a high, intricately designed ceiling depicted the forty-eight Ptolemaic constellations as known by the masters of the Renaissance. The fresco was made even more surreal by the movement the fictive beings seemed to possess. They danced around the interstellar space, whirling in a graceful flux and telling a story in time to the pulsing heart of the ever-expanding universe. Canis Major, Lyra, Carina and Ursa Minor, among others, rained stardust onto the floor, projecting their constellation in patterns of gold lines and stars etched into the opalescent marble. 

It harkened the demon to a bittersweet epoch, one of Music Halls, and blood theft, and revenants. Zenosyne betrayed both demon and lord, as time moved faster and faster from then on, speeding towards the inevitable conclusion of their--

The sound of a throat clearing interrupted his abstraction; the onomatopoeic, two syllabled _a-hem_ held with it the accented tone of familiarity. It was followed by a compassionate, “As always, it is a pleasure having you among us again, Sebastian. Are you here about a new contract?” 

The demon edged closer to the flowing mahogany counter, embellished with forget-me-nots, in large gilded urns instead of more suitable vases. It was yet another reminder of mockery to fuel his wrath. The attendant pouring over a weighty tome with a broken spine was less khansama and more oracle this time around. He had a prophetic aura that was still calm, but wiser; more knowing. And as his clouded, unseeing eyes assessed his new patron, Sebastian had the impression that Agni had seen more in his many lives than he’d been meant to. 

“Just visiting,” Sebastian replied. Silently, he brushed off the stardust from his head and shoulders and picked up a hint of an anxious scent from the upper floors, one whose bouquet promised secrets and schemes.

Agni’s unbandaged fingers walked along the textblock of the _Almagestum_ spread before him and opened it to a page two-fifths of the way in. He skimmed the tiny scrawl, his blind eyes fixed on the demon and informed him, “Very well. The Foundation gives you the utmost astrological clearance as a Singularity, Sebastian. As such, you would normally have access to the penthouse suites.” 

“Normally?” A categorical system? Classified by levels of power? _Interesting._

Under any other circumstance, Sebastian might have been impressed, might have taken the time to reacquaint himself with his old friend. But not now; he had no time for such trivialities. It was with renewed sentimentality that he hoped Agni would remain out of the fray when the time came; he preferred to not be the cause of the kind man’s demise. 

“Yes, _normally_ ,” Agni smiled. “Unfortunately there is no vacancy among those rooms this evening.” 

“I see.” The quick exchange was enough to inform the demon of two things: first, he knew assuredly that Agni had died since he’d held his lifeless, cleaved corpse before he’d been reaped; and yet, he’d returned. If the prickling in his hand was any indication, perhaps he wasn’t the only one. Second, those with the most power, likely in possession of the answers he sought, were huddled together on the top floor. 

“Then I shall simply go collect that which I came for,” he said, fishing a coin-sized, glassy black Adder stone from his pocket. Its center comprised of a semi-transparent nebula, birthplace of stars, which was clearly where the currency derived its value. He slid it onto the counter towards Agni and gave him a polite bow. 

Turning his back on the white-haired concierge, he crossed the lobby to the grand staircase, stepping deliberately on the eight main stars that made up the Great Dog upon the floor. Canis Major, more specifically _Sirius_ , the brightest star in the sky, had historical importance by marking the beginning of flood season along the Nile, thus it was essential for the survival of many civilizations. But not tonight. Crimson, rather than water would flow, should any stand in his way.

“Oh, and Sebastian,” Agni called him as his foot fell upon the first ivory step, “no business is to be conducted on these premises, without incurring heavy penalties. Management rules. I’m sure you understand. Perhaps a drink in the lounge instead, to relax?”

If Agni’s words were intended to calm, they had quite the opposite effect. Smoky hackles bristled beneath Sebastian’s clothes, and tendrils of shimmering black light undulated ominously ahead of him, eager for carnage. He chuckled under his breath, his lips twitching maliciously as he shook his head. The white-haired man was too serene, he would never understand. “Apologies in advance, Agni. This is personal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A big shout out to @teasmudge for her beta! <3
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> ㅤBasic designs for Rust & Stardust  
> ㅤSebastian, O!Ciel and Agni  
> ㅤBy: [T-stray](https://t-stray.tumblr.com)


	3. Canis Major

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was as if the electricity had been diverted to Ciel’s nervous system as well, and he jolted reflexively, pulling his Glock 42 out of his left ankle holster and cocked it. “You sodding freak!” he swore. And though the fingers of his right hand ached and throbbed, he held the weapon two-handed over the kneeling priest, aiming it at his chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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> Title: Canis Major  
> By: [T-stray](https://t-stray.tumblr.com)  
> Paintool Sai and ClipStudioPaint  
> Character (c) Yana Toboso  
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> Music inspiration: [Say Amen (Saturday Night) by Panic!At The Disco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI8tFthAZ5M)  
> 

"50 Holland Street." 

Ciel got into the passenger seat of his [McLaren 650S](https://stmed.net/sites/default/files/mclaren-650s-wallpapers-32375-7073168.jpg) and set two boxes of _Il Bordello_ pizza on his lap. From the saccharine scent that immediately filled the car, it confirmed that one of them was indeed a Hawaiian. Together with the original smell of the upholstery’s expensive leather-tanning oils, it was mildly repulsive. 

Worse still was the food’s heat transferring onto his thighs; the last thing he wanted was for the crust to go soggy and seep through the box onto his trousers. He might be sporting the restaurant’s signature muted blue short sleeve shirt and black bowtie, but it could easily be hidden with a bespoke vest and suit jacket if they ran short on time; not so with the matching pants. For things to go to plan, he would have less than ten minutes after his coup to meet Mr. Kadar at their predetermined rendezvous point; a complete wardrobe change would be next to impossible in the sleek sports car. But when have things ever run smoothly in his life?

“Punch it, Finny.” 

The blond driver did as was told, albeit reluctantly. It wasn’t that he hadn’t signed up for tonight’s assignment, or that he wasn’t used to being bossed around by the diminutive dictator next to him. Rather, it was the abysmal darkness that made him hesitant as he pulled into traffic. Most of the bridge lights had malfunctioned, as had most of the streetlights on the south side. The radio news anchor informed her listeners that electricians were diligently working on solving the issue, but the streets were now only lit by the grace of businesses still open at this ridiculous hour, and the few cars that were out. And though the moon was bright and full some hours ago when he and Ciel had parked outside the ritzy restaurant, it had since disappeared into obscurity. Even the starlight overhead seemed to stop mid-way through the sky, not reaching them. 

Finny tried to not let his imagination get the best of him; it wouldn’t be appreciated by Ciel, who was too even-minded and short-tempered for his stories and superstitions. "Do you know how weird it looks when a pizza delivery boy has a chauffeur?” 

"The priest's on the tenth floor,” Ciel answered disinterested, scrolling through the coding on his phone, effectively deleting the necessary records that implicated him in intercepting the pizza orders for the last two nights. “He won’t notice.”

“Yeah, but a delivery boy in a supercar though? You can’t be seen like this,” Finny criticized, putting his arm out across Ciel’s chest as he stopped abruptly at a set of lights. He noticed his friend shudder reflexively at having been touched. 

Ciel wasn’t sure if it was the thought of using the delivery kid’s Toyota Corolla or Finny’s seatbelt-limb that offended him more at that very moment. “I don't pay you for commentary,” he snapped, shrugging the arm off his chest and throwing his phone in the center console. 

“You don't pay me at all.” 

“Be that as it may, you should probably focus on the road,” Ciel frowned as he looked out the window. It was so sombre, his reflection was mirrored back at him; it blinked, his bi-coloured eyes squinting, trying to penetrate the darkness to distinguish where the front of his car ended and where the street began. 

This was the stuff of nightmares. Not his own of course, but he could understand why the streets were so desolate. Most people could scarcely comprehend that it was not the dark itself which they feared, but rather, the plausibility of what it masked. Not knowing what threats lurked in the shadows left them exposed and vulnerable. They were hardwired to think this way, to associate darkness with danger. He doubted most of them ever outgrew their childish fear of monsters or illogical views of fiery afterlives passed down by their ancestors. 

Ciel poked his tongue into his cheek and inhaled a long, irritated breath. While he shared Nietzsche's opinion that fear was the mother of morality, he could not understand the human persistence to invent things to dread in the face of the exquisite horror of reality. Sure, there were wars, disease and crowded spaces, but those were banal trivialities. A black hole some light-years away swallowing up the galaxy or the eventual heat death of the universe was even more bothersome. But none of this kept the young vigilante awake at night. What Ciel really feared was the powerful going unpunished and the dead remaining unavenged. 

By the time they neared [Neo Bankside](http://www.amcorpproperties.com/WebLITE/Applications/productcatalog/uploaded/pics/properties/current_properties/Blackfriars/Blackfriars.jpg) luxury apartments a handful of minutes later, Ciel had already detected a gradual cooling of the pizza. His stomach gave a disgruntled growl and he was half tempted to sort through the boxes to find the cheese one so that he could throw it in the back for later. Unfortunately, _John Smith_ had ordered _two_ pizzas. He always ordered two of them; at least he had done for the last three Thursdays since Ciel began tracking his orders online. 

_‘A Quattro Fromaggi for himself and a Hawaiian for the whore he calls up. Been like that for a year and a half now’_ , the delivery boy told him when Ciel had offered him payment to take over for this specific delivery. 

_‘And you’re sure it’s not his wife that gets the pineapple one?’_

_The pizza boy grinned wide, showing off his crooked teeth, ‘Nah. Priests ain’t got no wives. It’s always someone different, always ‘round your age or younger. Once he said that pineapple makes your jizz taste better.'_

_‘Right, and how many wives would swallow after the first year of marriage, especially for a minger like that?’ He attempted to joke to make up for his gaff. He should have remembered about priests and their vows of chastity, of course, but Ciel was less than Catholic in both name and morality. He quickly signed into an anonymous account on his mobile, ‘I’ve sent you four hundred pounds to your Paypal just now, and I’ll send you the same amount once I’ve made the delivery, as per our agreement.’_

_‘Wha--’ the pizza boy blurted, checking the app that buzzed a notification. Sure enough, the funds were there, sent no less by an elegantly animated shadow emoji taking the form of two ravens in flight. ‘But… I never… How do you know my name? My email?’_

_And even though Ciel was a head shorter, he clapped the boy condescendingly on the bicep, ‘Don’t worry about it, Peter, it’s my job to know.’_

The car pulled up to the curb a quarter of a kilometre away from the dynamic steel and glass tower that overlooked the south Thames and they parked at the delineation of the nearby Winter Gardens. Its awkward angle was excellent for obscuring the vehicle from any of the surrounding cameras. Ciel handed Finny the boxes and opened the glove compartment. From inside, he withdrew a tiny contact case and an iPod and plugged in the former so that its brightness illuminated the inside of the car. The light was enough for him to insert a single blue contact into his right eye and blink it into place. He wiped the resulting wetness at his lower eyelid with the back of his hand and turned in his seat to face the driver.

Finny held the lit iPod up to Ciel’s face and examined it, tilting his chin up, down and side to side to get a good view from every angle. “Yep, colour matches perfectly; no trace of violet.” 

Again, Ciel recoiled from Finny’s touch; it wasn’t personal, he’d simply developed an aversion to it early on. None of it could be attributed to germaphobic nonsense or self-esteem issues like his parents and therapist had surmised. There was just something _inside_ of him that repelled human contact, as if his skin and the flesh of another were the same poles of a magnet. An undefined law of physics in his mind that equated touching to possessing, to ownership. And Ciel Phantomhive belonged to no man nor woman. 

Finny adjusted the settings on the car stereo to sync with the hand-held device, and in no time, Ciel saw Finny’s face upon the GPS display in crystal clear imaging. 

“Alright, iris camera works too,” the driver said. “Turn to your right a sec.” 

Ciel looked askance, barely taking in the road next to him. It didn’t matter, the camera in his lense sharpened its focus and caught even the cracks upon the pavement. Another setting took in heat, and another for chemicals. They checked for sound as well, both for the wire Ciel wore under his dress shirt and in the earbud hidden under his shag-like hair and hat. 

“That should do. Don’t forget the security guard working tonight is Jumbo; yes you heard that correctly: Jumbo. It never takes Peter longer than eight minutes: in and out. Anything in excess of ten might be fishy.” Finny paused, inhaled and went on. “We ordered the pizzas twenty minutes before Kelvin usually does, so that should buy you roughly fifteen prior to the hooker being dropped off. If she gets here sooner, I’ll let you know. The fewer people see you, the better,” he droned on as if this was their first assignment. 

Ciel nodded all the same, not in the mood for Finny’s mother hen routine. He pulled one last thing from the glove compartment, inspected the safety and slipped it under his trousers to fasten it to an ankle holster. 

“What do you need a gun for?” Ciel heard Finny’s modulated question, but it came from a distance, the way sounds did when something suddenly took precedence in the forefront of one’s mind. 

_‘What do I need a gun for?’ a younger version of himself asked, except that it wasn’t him, not really, because he couldn’t ever recall handling a gun at that age, his parents would have never allowed it._

_Then the scene became deeply distorted. Trying to make out the individual that responded was like using someone else’s prescription glasses. It was blurry, faded and slightly disorienting. He strained to catch the broken response. ‘For protection… not in your pocket… or there… too close… artery… heart... dangerous… might go off… kill you..._

_A knowing smirk danced upon his weary, youthful face as he concealed the weapon at his breast, inside an outdated but finely tailored jacket. ‘Not if you catch the bullet first.’_

“Ciel… Ciel?” Finny waved his hand in front of his face until Ciel snapped to attention. “I don’t think you need a gun this time, he’s a priest for Christ’s sake.” 

“This wanker took a vow of poverty, stole from less fortunate people who glorify a Daddy in the Sky, abused their misguided trust and generosity and you want me to walk into the dragon’s den unprotected? I’m not putting anything past this guy.” Ciel took the pizzas from Finny’s lap, pushed the butterfly door to his car open and made his way west towards Neo Bankside. 

Walking at a brisk pace, he managed to make it to the front door in under a minute. He could see the security guard through the glass door sitting behind a reflective L-shaped desk with a collection of monitors to his left. Jumbo’s moniker suited him, even if it did sound like something out of a circus. He was enormous, built like a gorilla, and as bald as a monk whose serene features he embodied. 

Ciel bowed his head and made sure to keep his back turned to the guard and the camera by the entryway. He dialled the number posted next to John Smith’s name and waited as it rang once, twice and picked up on the third ring. 

It was a wheezing, nasally croak that answered.“Yeah?” 

Immediate repugnance walloped Ciel over the head and his mouth went dry. The hair on the back of his neck stood and chill bumps covered the skin on his exposed arms. “Pizza,” he muffled, in case the older man questioned his identity. 

The door to the lobby clicked as the buzzer tolled and Ciel let himself in, balancing the food precariously on his right forearm. Jumbo’s nose was buried in a David Copperfield book which only hid half his large face. He waved Ciel through without ever taking his eyes off his novel. 

He went beyond the four glass elevators, visualizing the blueprints he’d studied previously. Looking over his shoulder to make sure Jumbo was still reading, he continued along the hallway and snuck into the stairwell located between the private theatre and a conference room. He breathed a sigh of relief as the door shut quietly behind him. 

“One camera per flight, ten flights,” Ciel mouthed, a pep talk more than anything else. His lungs ached at the very thought of it and he was sure the muscles in his legs were already burning. He tried to forget that Finny had offered multiple times to go in his stead, but Ciel had learned early on to never fully trust anyone but himself; especially in matters that would reflect his competence, resourcefulness and ruthlessness. No, there was too much at stake this time. In exchange for damaging evidence on Father Kelvin, the requesting client would hand over information on the unsolved murders of Ciel’s parents. 

At least, they were unsolved to him. He hadn’t been satisfied by what the bobbies had found, nor the bloke they’d tossed in jail: a delinquent with a rap sheet of misdemeanours. Ciel refused to believe that some petty thug could have one-upped Vincent Phantomhive; not after his father had spent the better part of his adulthood working contracts for the SIS. Too many things didn’t add up. Robbery had allegedly been the motive behind the crime, but nothing had been taken except for the family heirloom, an ornate silver ring adorned by an emerald-cut sapphire. Rachel’s jewelry, the keys to the Bentley and both her purse and Vincent’s wallet had been left untouched. And his parents were to be attending a widely acclaimed production of Carmen at the Royal Opera House that evening, not snogging in a suite at the Royal Horseguards. Even at the age of ten, Ciel knew his way enough around cyberspace, thanks to his father, to discover that no reservation had been made under Phantomhive senior’s name, or the list of aliases he commonly used. 

However, it was the lack of a mortician’s report, the fact that he’d never been allowed to view the bodies prior to their cremation (despite the fact that Gramps had power of attorney and had deemed it permissible) and the empty urns that had been returned to their London townhome that added utmost suspicion upon Ciel’s already misanthropic temperament. 

And so what was a little asthma attack if it brought him closer to some much-desired answers? 

He pawed his back pocket, just to check he had his inhaler and when he felt its familiar outline, he looked for the surveillance cameras. He could spot them easily, they were the convex stationary kind, Hikvisions. For a billion-dollar tower, they cheaped out on security. His head fell forward to his chest and he whispered, “Loop it, Finny.” 

Ciel heard the quick tapping of keys in his ear and then a mumbled, “It’s done, go. You’re a minute behind.” For a typically boisterous prat, Finny enjoyed breathing his words into the mic even though he didn’t have to. Maybe it made him feel more conspiratorial or more integral to the assignment. Ciel knew Finny hated being left behind, that he fretted over his safety. He liked to talk a big game, how he would take on ten people for Ciel if necessary. It made him laugh; Finny might be a little taller, but he was barely any bigger. 

Ciel marched up the stairwell, keeping close to the wall. For the first flight, he took the stairs two at a time. By the second, he breathed evenly through his nose and didn't overexert himself. By the fifth, he was cursing, until Finny reminded him that the client would hear his use of the Lord's name in vain. _Fantastic, someone else to witness his weakness._ He made a mental note of editing out the start of the video before delivering it to Kadar. 

When he reached the seventh flight, he sat, forearms on his knees as he shook the puffer. He inhaled deeply, blew everything out and took a long pull of the medication. The pizza felt heavier than it should, like it was weighed down with plutonium rather than pineapple, and that was nothing when compared to his legs which had miraculously filled with lead. Still, he trudged, grumbling internally, vowing to work on his cardio the moment he found the time (which was never). 

He reached the last floor, caught his breath and wiped his face and hairline with a silken handkerchief emblazoned with the Phantomhive crest. 

"You better not be doing what I think you're doing, you've got four minutes left," Finny instructed diligently, but his smirk came through.

"Sod off already," Ciel swore, then peeked his head through the door. When none of the occupants from the three suites at the top floor were in sight, he sauntered to 1003 at the far end. 

He cleared his throat and as his hand came up to the knocker, it paused mid-air. It was a curious ornament, a large brass moth with eyes for spots and for the second time tonight, without so much as having met the priest yet, Ciel developed a visceral dislike for him. Perhaps dislike was too kind of a word. He was appalled by him. Loathed his very existence and it had little to do with the fact that he was both an opiate dealer for the masses and a pettifogging mouthpiece for an institution that preyed on the fear of eternal damnation. 

He swallowed and held the handle of the knocker. From between the moth's wings, a copious eye like a black-jewelled beetle emerged. It swam amidst a swampy sclera and plodded left to right from the peephole, then blinked in quick succession when it fell on Ciel’s person. Immediately, the door wrenched open.

"You've come at last!" 

It seemed an over-enthusiastic response to pizza. “Are you... John Smith, sir?” Ciel asked, with a note of hesitation, turning the boxes around, pretending to read the name written on the bill taped to the top one. 

“Yes, but I am most ashamed for you to see me this way,” the older man replied with a grand sweep of his manicured hand along his own body. “Please, won’t you come in? I’ll fetch a robe and your money.”

The door was held wide open and when Ciel stepped over the threshold, a sense of foreboding spread from his guts to his mouth. He knew it was less than intelligent to accept such an invitation on his own, and yet, even if Finny were to accompany him, it _still_ wouldn’t have felt right. Something was missing, but he shook off the malaise and entered. 

To tell the truth, Ciel thought the man should have been more concerned with his face rather than what he was wearing. The cotton boxers that revealed his atrophied legs and the white t-shirt yellowed with age was nothing as unsettling as a porcelain doll’s skin on a middle-aged man. It was the kind that had been whitened and stretched, its facial muscles paralyzed in order to get rid of wrinkles. The end result was not as intended, it lacked youthfulness. Instead, he appeared to have had too many plastic surgeries and it gave him an uncanny semblance to something a little too leathery and not quite human. 

And yet, it was definitely Kelvin, under the most common of aliases. Nearly the same man from the picture Kadar had sent; except the photograph that had been taken at a gala for one of the many charitable organizations directed by the priest, had been grossly manipulated so that he seemed more handsome than he was. 

Kelvin returned ensconced in velvet and held a money clip fit to burst. “I’m sorry,” he said, fingering the bills with his thumb, “in my delight to see the food arrive, my rudeness overtook me and I failed to ask your name.” He removed four twenty pound notes from the stack, put his hand in the side pocket of the delivery boy’s trousers, while Ciel’s were occupied holding the pizza. 

Ciel felt the creep’s fingers brush along his thigh and linger a moment too long. With his stomach churning, he reversed a step, his back and heels against the door. His voice cracked pubescent-like when he answered. “It’s Jim, sir.” 

All he wanted to do was reach for his gun and pistol whip the pervert with it. His fingers itched at his sides as he considered whether it would be more satisfying to see Kelvin bleeding and writhing on the floor, or to know what happened to his parents. 

It wouldn’t… yet. He could get what his client wanted, evidence of the priest’s embezzlement, and then expose his _other crimes_ on his own time. 

With a roguish grin, Kelvin finally removed his hand from Ciel’s person and took the pizzas. “You’re new at _Il Bordello_ , aren’t you Jim? I haven’t seen you before. Mind, I usually request Peter, he’s rather efficient. But you, you were much quicker, and dare I say, much easier on the eyes… like a beautiful flower of darkness.”

 _Wrapped in thorns,_ Ciel thought, internally cringing. He thanked his ambitious nature for the millionth time, glad that he had cultivated a clandestine organization, instead of having entertained a pedestrian job such as this during his adolescence. Nevertheless, he cocked his head and smiled coquettishly, taking his bottom lip between his teeth. He knew the drill and it sucked. 

“That’s awfully kind of you Mr. Smith. I certainly wouldn’t mind if you requested me in the future. I’ve never worked in such a posh neighbourhood before, I’m from Newham, myself.” 

He was taking a risk mentioning the deprived borough; three of Kelvin’s parishes were in Newham. Ciel blamed the impulsive selection of that specific area on morbid curiosity -- he was eager to see if the priest would show any sign of remorse or recognition. 

“Great! Keep flirting, we need more visuals of the penthouse,” Finny whispered in his ear. 

Kelvin frowned, “Oh you poor dear. How does an exquisite rose bloom in such contamination? Are you in a rush? Would you like to join me? You look dead on your feet, I expect you could use a slice.”

Finny sputtered. “You don’t have time, Ciel. Ask to use the washroom and leave.” 

“A man with such an impressive physique wouldn’t be ordering two pizzas for himself Mr. Smith,” Ciel hoped the blush that spread across his cheeks would be interpreted as kittenishness rather than the kind embarrassment accompanied by his disbelief at uttering the words _impressive physique_. “I mean, you must be expecting someone soon.” 

“Not for a while, Jim. Why don’t you go straight through, take the second left to the living room and have a seat? I’ll get us some plates and drinks to go with this pizza. I fix a mean [Satan’s Whiskers](https://makemeacocktail.com/cocktail/7003/satan-s-whiskers/),” Kelvin offered, raising his eyebrows with wolfish suggestivity. 

Taking a few steps forward and past Kelvin, Ciel consented to the invitation, but denied the gin-vermouth beverage. He glanced back in time to see the priest turn the lock on the door and called demurely over his shoulder, “Oh, I’m not of age to drink yet, Mr. Smith. But I would love some tea if you’re offering…” 

Ciel hoped that the tea making process would buy him a few more minutes to snoop. The first door on the right was the kitchen, an elaborate chef’s dream, white and spotless with multiple ovens and sinks built into matching marble countertops. The first room to the left was a study. He was sure that--

“Don’t even think about it,” Finny warned. “Keep going to the living room. Get a good view of the artwork on the walls, too.” 

He did as he was told, pausing in the pristine hallway lined with a Safavid runner that muffled the sound of footsteps. Resisting the urge to blink, he took in all three familiar artworks. The last he heard, _[Diomedes Devoured by Horses](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/106542/gustave-moreau-diomedes-devoured-by-horses-french-1866/?dz=0.4462,0.4128,1.12)_ by Moreau had fetched above twenty-six million pounds at a private auction and its buyer had remained anonymous. He couldn’t be sure of the cost of _[Cupid and Psyche](https://media.mutualart.com/Images/2009_08/30/0007/706886/6a0a5d52-7342-4f3b-a52a-38957e3c197b_g_570.Jpeg)_ or _[Saturn](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dd/Rubens_saturn.jpg/290px-Rubens_saturn.jpg)_ , but he knew Kelvin hadn’t acquired them at Camden Stables. 

“Did you hear that beep?” Finny asked. 

“Mmm.” Only just. Finny had likely picked up something on the mic that his own ears hadn’t. 

“Kelvin just called Jumbo. Told him to keep his guest downstairs until he was ready.”

“Okay,” Ciel breathed, taking the first of two stairs descending into the circular living area. The bulbs fit into the ceiling detected his movement and came to life, illuminating the opulent space, which could have doubled as an eccentric museum exhibit. 

From the cathedral ceiling hung a large medievalesque candelabra with half-burnt candles. Cages that should be filled with songbirds were strung on the eastern and western walls, their inhabitants priceless Faberge lambs and eggs depicting the meek creatures' sacrifice. 

Ciel's legs stalled, refused to go further. He sought the safety of obscurity, an escape other than the way he came in, but the room was so lit up, even suspended objects did not cast a shadow. The only solace lay before him: a sea of endless black. Any other time, the view through the windowed wall would have rendered him indifferent. But not now. He knew, due to the room’s orientation, that he should be overlooking the Thames, but without the bustle of the London nightlife or the lone, cold moon upon the river, all he could make out was an imprecate soot so heavy that it eclipsed whatever lights they’d managed to get working below. It was easier to imagine that the darkness could swallow him up this way, and envelop him in the asylum of its starless embrace. 

His feet deracinated from the floor and he stumbled forward like a sleepwalker, as if mesmerized by the night. Beyond his reflection lay Lethe, irresistible oblivion. What would it cost his soul to plead the Fates to unravel his thread a little quicker from the loom of time and allow him to shed his mortal coil, to plunge into that infinite abyss? Just this once. A first in his twenty years, or was it longer than that? It hardly mattered as long as it promised sweet, selfish release.

Head held high, he crossed the room, moving without conscious awareness until his knees slammed hard into a table near the window to which he was beckoned. He lurched forward, cursing, “Damn it,” and caught himself upon the unwrought sandstone surface, scraping his hands. The burning sensation was enough to pull him from his trance-like state, or perhaps it was coming face to face with an ancient volute krater vase set dead center atop the large slab that roused him. 

He straightened quickly, red in the face when he heard Finny chuckling from inside his ear. 

“You falling arse over tit?”

“Shut up, I tripped,” he lied, hating that his client would witness it; worse still, that it was a fully believable lie, given he often had the grace of a baby giraffe learning to stand on its legs. Regardless, he wouldn’t have known how to explain the truth to Finny, had no idea what to make of his momentary lapse in attention. 

He released the furrow in his brow and set to examine the artifact. It really had him stumped. Ciel considered himself quite learned in history and art, and his exposure to it had not been accidental. His mother had been the manager of exhibitions at the National Gallery and her home office had been plastered with procurement requests, old books, files and photographs of hard to acquire pieces -- in fact, it still was. He had made room for himself and the technology required to provide his subversive services, but everything else was as she had left it ten years ago.

But this [vase](https://www.dropbox.com/s/4opc0vmpiv0qzet/vasealone.png?dl=0), he hadn’t ever seen anything like it. Of course, it had some semblance to an intricate piece of pottery, harkening back to Ancient Greece, but he was shocked upon touching it. What he imagined to be a mute-coloured, grainy terracotta, was actually a mildly rusted forged metal. His fingers had barely grazed the surface when he hissed. 

“Hey? You okay?” 

“Yeah, it’s...” Ciel half-answered, the pain becoming secondary to his interest. 

The metal had been so bitterly cold that it had burned the pads of his fingers and left the skin there irritated, red and prickling with numbness. It made no sense; there was no indication of its chill, no clinging grayish-white crystalline vapour. And yet, his breath plumed about him in a cloud when the heat from his exhalation made contact with it, flaring his nostrils at the smell of rum and raspberries that washed his face when it rebounded.

Transfixed by its allure and craving the inexplicable sting, he touched it again, fingering the unseen concavities on its belly and relished the painful pleasure until he was numb to it. He meandered around the table’s perimeter, hand hovering over the handles that curled from the lip to fully capture its details. At a rotation of one hundred and eighty degrees, he met a faded, circular seal that took up more than half the space. He couldn’t shake the idea that it had meant to be hidden from plain sight, facing the outside as it had been. 

With his sleeve, he rubbed it, trying to make it clearer, as if it would also alleviate the fogginess of his stilted memory; the mark seemed familiar, but he couldn’t recall it. Was it from a dream? A book he’d read? He traced the embossed [symbol](https://i0.wp.com/www.demonicpedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/naberius-seal.jpg) with his index finger; it resembled a three-stringed harp laid on its side, or else a five-fingered claw. A capital ‘T’ impaled it, as did as a headless, four-limbed eunuch, both of which had their extremities punctuated by hollow dots. It filled him with a special kind of homesickness, a longing for a home that never was, unsettling him and turning his steely resolve into something frail and brittle like flesh and bone. 

He came back three hundred and sixty degrees to face the sky again when tiny hairs raised on the back of his neck. 

“Beautiful aren’t you?” Kelvin asked, standing so close to him that the laden tray in his hands brushed the curve of Ciel’s back. 

“Pardon?” Ciel crowed, saying the word like it left a bad taste in his mouth. He was hard-pressed to conceal the revulsion in his face. His nose kept wanting to wrinkle, and his feet wanted to put as much distance between them as possible. 

Kelvin helped with that, moving away from him to one of two camelback settees that flanked the too-tall table. He lay the small tray burdened with two slices of pizza, a steaming teacup filled to the brim, a tankard and a tea towel upon it. His attention was on the vase now rather than Ciel, and when he spoke with a babied coo, it was directed to the antique. “It took me forever to find you, didn’t it?” Then his eyes met the pizza boy’s confused face, “It’s part of an enormous collection. Seventy-two in all.” 

Seventy-two? Seventy-two? Ciel’s mind raced. Why was seventy-two important? In science, it was the atomic number for _hafnium_ , in finance, Rule of 72, in music, a tuning used by modern byzantine composers… In religion, it was used everywhere: degrees of Jacob’s Ladder, number of names of god in Kabbalah, number of languages spoken at the Tower of Babylon, number of evil disciples that enclosed Osiris in a coffin, number of major temples found at Angkor… maybe a vase was found in each? That explained the indecipherable emblem. 

“Mmm… Is this the only one you have? Where are the others?” he asked noncommittally. 

Kelvin motioned for Ciel to have a seat across from him and handed him a Royal Doulton plate on which lay a solitary slice of Hawaiian pizza. _Disgusting_. 

“Oh my dear boy, this one cost me a mint! The amount of money I had to move around was astronomical. I expect it rivals the [Crown Jewels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Jewels_of_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:Crown_Jewels.jpg).” 

“Ciel. Don’t eat the pizza,” Finny’s anxious voice cautioned. “Traces of inorganic compounds are registering on your pineapple that isn’t naturally occurring and that aren’t on Kelvin’s food.”

Ciel swallowed, unsurprised by this development. “And why do you think it’s so valuable, Mister Smith? Did it house some ancient god, or something?” His tone remained casual as he resolutely avoided the food, hands in his lap. 

“Did it… house some ancient god?” Kelvin repeated. 

_Gotcha!_ Ciel exalted internally. Repeating the question was usually a sign of deception, a way to give the liar time to think up an answer; as were eyes glancing skywards to the right and fingers fiddling uselessly with something; both of which Kelvin was guilty at the moment. He toyed with the teacup he’d brought for his guest, running his finger over the dainty handle and mapping out the classic Spode design on its abdomen. 

When the priest finally lifted the blue and white china without the accompanying saucer, he tilted it dangerously and Ciel watched on, feeling disembodied, as the rouged liquid slopped over the mouth and spilled onto the blanched table. Kelvin had evidently burned his fingers and dropped the cup where it shattered at the edge and sent tea and ceramic shards cascading to the floor. 

Ciel held his breath, eyes widening in enigmatic horror as he followed the red rivulets that streamed a network of arterial paths down the table’s face. And that’s when it dawned on him; this was not a living room table. It lacked legs, was higher than the settees and nothing more than a giant slab of rock. 

This was an altar. 

He stood abruptly when Kelvin got on one knee, tea towel in hand to soak up his mess before it stained the granite floor or his ‘table’. 

“Sit, sit,” Kelvin implored. The tempo of his words fell from his lips as quickly as an auctioneer, but not nearly as steady. “Forgive me, I’m not used to such captivating company, I was momentarily distracted. I’m sure you understand, it must be a common occurrence for one such as yourself. Please have your pizza.” 

“I don’t like pineapple, can we switch?” he asked with as much civility as he could muster. His voice sounded far away in his ears, an echo in a room much larger than this one. 

“Neither do I. Why don’t I get you a cheese one in the kitchen?” Kelvin offered, picking up the remains of the cup. 

Ciel was still on his feet, gaping at the window where the reflection had all but vanished the vase and replaced it with a willowy, blood-soaked child whose bound limbs twitched and spasmed involuntarily. Its small back arched against the stone in agony, its chest fighting for breath despite a ceremonial knife lodged so deeply into it that the tip could be seen gleaming from the other end. Eyes unblinking, fixed on the gory spectacle brought to life on the window, Ciel’s hand surged toward the center of the altar with nothing but muscle memory and unthinking desperation to remove the blade. 

It was not the wooden handle with which his hand made contact, but the scalding sear of frost. The sheer force and will of his extension snapped three of his fingers back and the crunch of bone ricocheted along with a pained moan. Simultaneously, the vase thudded with calamitous portent onto the stone and rolled off, smashing against the floor vulgarly. 

“Ciel, no!” Kelvin cried a high pitched keen over the din, whimpering on all fours and trying fruitlessly to reassemble the vestiges of his prized possession. 

Reality snapped back into place and Ciel increased his personal space from the pitiful man by two steps. “What… what did you call me?”

“I mean Jim…” Kelvin seethed as splintered alloy sliced deep into his flesh. 

Metal should not have shattered, not like that. Ciel added the mystery to the mountain of things that didn’t make sense right now. 

“No,” he shook his head, protesting, “no, you called me _Ciel_...”

Blood spurted from the new gash on Kelvin’s palm and he tried to stymie the flow by ripping a piece of the already drenched tea towel with his teeth. He bandaged the cut, and then another, and another, as if mummifying himself. The London lights outside flickered, coming back to life one at a time and cast a shadow that shifted the likeness of Kelvin’s face to a rounder one, with only his left eye and mouth exposed, his legs hidden, insinuating amputation. 

It was as if the electricity had been diverted to Ciel’s nervous system as well, and he jolted reflexively, pulling his [Glock 42](http://greyarsenal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_0759-300x300.jpg) out of his left ankle holster and cocked it. “You sodding freak!” he swore. And though the fingers of his right hand ached and throbbed, he held the weapon two-handed over the kneeling priest, aiming it at his chest. 

“Ciel! Stop! Get out of there… now,” Finny panicked. Ciel heard him close the car door and run down the sidewalk. He was coming. 

Ciel was overheating, and his stomach fluttered restlessly. “He knows my name,” he told Finny out loud. Kelvin looked at him with a jubilant expression dancing on his face, his hands out at his side rather than up. It made Ciel sick with confusion. “How?”

“It doesn’t matter. Just leave. Come down the stairwell. I’ll wait for you there.”

Ciel adjusted his stance, came nearer to his target. His hands were steady, like they’d killed so many times before. Like he’d killed Kelvin before. “You can’t get past security. He’s huge, Finny.” 

“Don’t worry about me. He’s busy,” Finny panted, knocking on the outside door and by the sound of it, quite excessively. Ciel made out the faint groan of glass before it gave way. 

“Busy with the girl Kelvin ordered?”

Kelvin snivelled pathetically on the floor and made a pleading grab for Ciel’s foot. He kicked out, his cap-toe Oxfords connecting with the man’s nose with a satisfying static of grinding bone and sinew. “Don’t touch me, you filth.” 

“No… not a girl…”

“Explain!” 

Kelvin sputtered, assuming the order had been for him, but it was Finny who answered first. “A boy. Looks young, Ciel. Dressed scanty.”

“How old!?” he demanded Kelvin. “How old is the boy?” 

“F-fourteen. He’s a lad from Whitechapel Mission…”

Ciel’s lip curled in disgust, and his tone flatlined. “The homeless shelter you oversee?” 

Kelvin’s eyes bulged and he dissolved into tears at the implication. “No! No! It’s not like _that_. I can’t have you think of me like that, Ciel. I would never…”

“Why else would you drug them?” Ciel asked between clenched teeth, shifting the weight on his feet. His hand was ice-cold like the vase had been and his finger was white, as if the trigger were sucking the heat from it. It twitched, almost squeezing the little lever. At this point, every breath was a test of his restraint. 

“We reenact that night... That’s all! They get a good meal and money. I swear… I swear…” The priest stammered, hands coming together in prayer, begging. 

“Reenact what?” His heart beat in his ears, the blood rushing. He felt _caged_ by his familiar fury. “Finny! Is there blood on the altar?”

Pant. Pant. Chelsea boots against concrete stairs. “Yes.” Pant. “Traces of iron. Blood.” 

“Anything else?” Ciel barked ominously, not wanting to really hear the answer. 

“No. Just blood.” Finny was breathless. “I’m in the stairwell… coming up... Get… get out.”

Kelvin’s face broke into an ecstatic, wet smile, as he lay his hand over his heart. “You really don’t remember?” He pulled in deep gulps of air between wracking sobs.

Another step forward and Ciel pressed the gun to Kelvin’s temple. “What the hell are you on about?” He punctuated every word. 

“Your brother. I’m just so glad...”

Ciel interrupted, shouting. “I don’t have a brother!” 

“I’m just so glad it’s me,” the priest whimpered quietly, rejoicing. “I’ll be the first to remind you. A blessing. Beautiful executioner! A beauteous final moment! How I wanted to find you myself, but you found me, it was fa--”

Ciel pulled the trigger, never gave Kelvin the chance to finish his word. He knew what he’d been about to say: they shared nothing in common, much less a destiny. He put his foot on Kelvin’s head and crushed the wound perforated there, not letting him utter that word between his dying gasps. 

He wasn’t sure how long he stood that way, but eventually, Kelvin stopped breathing, and Finny found him still clutching the gun in his good hand. 

Finny, still short-winded released the Glock from his grasp and pocketed it. “This wasn’t part of the plan, Ciel. We’re officially late to your rendezvous, and with the amount of editing we’ll have to do...” 

Ciel wasn’t listening. He stepped over the corpse, careful to tread on it, and walked to the shattered vase, sifting through the pieces with his foot until he found the one he wanted. It was no bigger than his hand, but its mass was substantial. Sin was a weighty thing that could only find its balance in the pound of flesh that was its due. He gave it to Finny to carry and moved wordlessly throughout the rest of the penthouse, paying special attention to the contents of the safe he cracked in the master bedroom as well as financial statements from at least twelve different institutions spanning the world. 

When he finished, Finny was waiting for him at the door, his back turned to the main hall, hunched over his phone. Ciel slipped into the kitchen momentarily, retrieving his mobile from his back pocket. He noticed a blue light blinking - a voicemail had been left - and he chose to ignore it in favour of synching his device to his friend’s without the other being any the wiser. 

_Finnian: It’s happened._  
_Tanaka: He remembers?_  
_Finnian: I’m not sure to what extent. Just get over here with the crew to clean up this mess._  
_Tanaka: We’re a block away._

“What happened to Jumbo?” Ciel asked, coming into the hallway. He put the conversation out of his mind for now, there was no point in questioning Finny about it. It rankled that they underestimated him this way. _Inhuminitas_ might have been Vincent Phantomhive’s brainchild, but it was he, Ciel, that had brought it to life. And simply because he counted Finny and Tanaka among his most trusted, did not mean they were free from suspicion. Devout servitude was hard to come by, and people were inherently flawed by dint of their own humanity. 

“Um… asleep,” Finny said sheepishly, not making eye contact with Ciel, as he led him back down the stairwell. Sure enough, when they reached the main lobby, the massive guard was slumped over in the cradle of his own arms and looked positively knackered. 

If it wasn’t for the handprint on Jumbo’s forehead and the slight bruising of the carotid artery at his neck, Ciel might have thought the man had legitimately fallen asleep, but he knew a sleeper hold when he saw it. He sized Finny up, long and lean, then threw a glance over his shoulder at Jumbo as they crossed the threshold. There was no way his friend could have…

“And the boy?” he asked casually as they strode quickly to the McLaren. 

“Left. Got sick of waiting.” 

“Mmm…” They got into the car and Ciel noticed the non-descript van parked on the other side of the street. He saw the outline of the familiar driver and a smaller frame beside him and as he and Finny drove off, two figures emerged from it and made their way to Neo Bankside. 

Using the passenger mirror he removed his contact lens and stored it appropriately. He barely had the time to go through the footage to edit it when his phone buzzed. An unmarked number was calling and he knew he had a lot of explaining to do. He filled his cheeks and blew the air out in an effort to calm himself before answering. 

“You’re late.” 

“I’m aware of that,” he grumbled back, putting the phone on speaker so he could change his shirt with a more suitable one thrown over his seat. The crisp interior hit his flesh and the sweat that had seeped during the ordeal turned cold, peaking his pierced nipples and causing him to shiver. 

“As luck would have it, you’re forgiven. I’ve found a preferable location for us to meet,” said Mr. Kadar imperiously, “in fact, I’m there now.” 

Ciel rolled his eyes at the sheer entitlement of the statement. He was tempted to cancel the transaction altogether, go home and crawl into bed with an Ambien and a finger of whiskey. “And where would that be?” 

“The Royal Horseguards. When can you be here?” 

Ciel’s fingers stopped fastening the buttons on his shirt, and he looked to Finny to make sure he’d heard it correctly. Ever since his parent’s death, he’d been barred from the location, both by his guardian and the proprietors. Of course, he could have figured a way in if he really wanted, but without Tanaka and Finny’s support, too much was left to chance. “Ten minutes, give or take. It depends on this infernal darkness.”

“It’s worse the closer you get to the hotel. Take your time, I’ll meet you at the entrance.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't do any of this without @teasmudge and @gocaitycat. Thank you one again for lending me your eyes and your brains!


	4. Apastron

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The offensive doorman ignored the threat, and instead leaned in, speaking in a shallow murmur that mimicked his breath. “If you value your life, it is in your best interest to call your driver and leave immediately. You’ll find no information here, only more questions to which you do not want answers.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>    
> 
> 
> Title: Apastron  
> By: [T-stray](https://t-stray.tumblr.com)  
> Paintool Sai and ClipStudioPaint  
> Character (c) Yana Toboso  
> 
> 
>   
> Music inspiration: [Blame](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY2yXvjFBsU) & [Doom Days](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM53vEiNMeI) by Bastille

One minute, Sebastian was typhonic: dangerous and destructive, ready to tear through the Naberius in search of answers; but in the time it took for an ancient vase to fall from an altar onto the floor some twelve kilometres away, he became still, empty like the eye of the storm. He halted mid-step, brain chewing over his newfound freedom. The magical entrapment that had bound him symbolically to his former prison slipped like a shadow through fiddled fingers until it was no more. 

“Short will be thy tyranny over us…” he mocked Solomon sardonically, gently placing his foot on the step. The plod, plod, plod of marble under his polished Oxfords reminded him of the many stagnant souls that had fallen victim to his heel. 

Dual screeching growls ripped through his tailcoats, blowing them out behind him. 

“There, there,” he soothed, smoothing the non-existent wrinkles from his jacket. Hell’s rumble quieted immediately under the mollifying touch as Sebastian ascended the opulent staircase, following the faint pull of something _familiar_. It took hold of him, led him like a dog on a leash to the second floor, through hallways with carts holding trays of discarded foodstuffs and patterned carpets devoid of the muted stains that came with most hotels. 

He could hear cowardly patrons scuttling in their rooms, each of which was designated by protective sigils rather than numbers. Murky tendrils flared from his human form and ran along the corridor walls, cosseting the doors with a satisfying hiss. Upon contact, the seals blackened and oozed to the floor in small puddles, seeping under the entryways. 

“How is that possible?” he overheard one resident. 

“There’s no violence here. There’s no violence here,” another chanted in a self-pacifying mantra. 

“Shouldn’t have come... The omens... Too many cats and magpies swarming the street…” a nervous voice confessed, as its owner threw their belongings into a suitcase.

The moon seeped from the clouds, illuminating the elaborate Rose window at the end of the hall, and Sebastian paused. The streak of cleansing light that shone in stopped dead at his feet, averse to trespassing his darkness. Arrogantly, he strode into it and it receded, bending at an unnatural angle and escaping under the gap of the door where hushed tones conspired amidst a flurry of activity. 

“Try not to think about it, Augustus,” a tiny, dark-haired reaper spoke with false calm. “It’ll be fine. Focus on something else; like right now, I’m about to sink the eight ball in _that_ corner pocket and you’re going to owe me four hours of free overtime.” There was a crack of one ball hitting another, a hush of the billiard table’s felt fibres flattening and a curse as the ball failed to find its desired destination. 

“I can’t, Sasch. It’s there. I can’t get _him_ out of my head.” The dreadlocked reaper walked the perimeter of the table, examining the remaining four balls. 

“It’s in all your heads,” Sascha said apathetically, taking a drink from their gin and tonic. “Just think about… food or something. What’d you have for lunch?” 

“Bubblewrap,” Augustus stated simply, recalling the fluffy waffle that melted in his mouth and the vanilla gelato crammed inside. It helped, that was until he remembered the part about the sticky chocolate ganache. 

_The boy sat at the head of a long table with all his favourite dishes laid out before him. They had been emptied of their contents, but for a lush two-tiered slice of gateau smothered in a shiny glaze. A last meal. A final supper. And he relished the remaining moments, making a show of each bite, smacking his lips and licking the spoon. His appetite satiated with every mouthful -- a direct inversion to his butler’s excruciating hunger. A banquet fit for Bacchus, a most macabre meal, one where the feaster would become the main course._

Augustus’ pool cue fell to the floor and he grabbed his head, tugging his hair at his temples. “Quatsch! I can’t…” Immediately, he started trying to recite the German alphabet in reverse to rid himself of the memory that was not his own. 

Too late. 

The demon could hardly read minds, but that did not mean he could not _feel_ the tenor of thoughts. Some were easier than others; lies, for instance, were tart and agreeably sharp, abstraction was vaguely unripe, biases were bland, but memories were intensely personal, bore part of a person’s quintessence, held within them a flavour even more unique than the human genome. And this one, in particular, could belong to none but the Earl of Phantomhive, which meant that he was, by the same miracle as Agni’s reappearance, behind that door. He had doubtlessly gotten into a spot of trouble (again), was likely bound and gagged, anticipating rescue. 

It excited the devil. Eased his hunger and aroused it all at once. The hallway lights crackled menacingly on their sconces and their incandescent filaments caught fire within their bulbs. A breath later, they burst through the glass to mimic those infernal candles that lit the way to Hell. 

Sebastian straightened, proud and confident like the butler his young master deserved and armed himself with a full-lipped mouth stretched into a polite, societal smile. He knocked thrice at the door, intonating a guarded greeting, whose kindness barely veiled the hint of a threat. 

“Good evening,” he said with perfect aristocratic diction, knowing full-well the beings inside could hear him clear as crystal. “I believe you have something that belongs to me.”

All at once, the reapers’ assuring bravado from beyond the door evaporated. A pall had been cast in its place, as if the room had become their coffin. 

A bubak clad head to toe in the souls he’d collected that evening, sat solitarily at a table in the far left corner by the large mirror. Until now, he’d been engaged in a game of chess with this reflection. He had just checkmated the king using two rooks when the devil’s voice had filtered through and broke his concentration. Rather than direct his attention to where everyone was now looking, he nodded solemnly to the scarecrow-like entity that was his reflection. 

What stared back did not mime the acknowledgment, as mirrors were wont to do; instead, the bubak’s identical counterpart grinned sinisterly, tearing a seam in his burlap sack of a head to do so. With its soiled hands bearing meathooks for claws, it grasped at the mirror’s edge and climbed out as if it were a window. 

“The demon’s bluffing,” the first bubak challenged, “each room is protected by the sigils of Solomon, to which he is a slave. He’ll not come in if he knows what’s good for him.” Despite his pompousness, the monster and his copy still heaved a large, subtly squirming gunny bag of their young victims over the bar for safekeeping. It fell with a thud, and from within, a toddler cried out feebly for its parents. 

From the hall, an inhuman roar of laughter shook the bottles of spirits lining the back of the room. Yet, it was the bestial, sharp-pitched hisses belonging to the butler’s shadowed pets at either side of him that blew the door wide open.

Sebastian’s flesh seethed with restless energy under the constraints of his human facade. Outwardly, he presented a flawlessly calm countenance, moving with the sensual grace of a Schumann’s Opus over the threshold. Except for his eyes. Those darted round the room menacingly, taking inventory of available prey: two reapers, one of which looked familiar, and two bubaks. But from what he could see, there was no young master; only the unmistakable linger of his presence.

“You mean this sigil?” Sebastian teased to hide his disappointment. He summoned the liquified seal from the floor, like reverse rain into his gloved hand. To add further insult to injury, he poured its viscous remnants over a hulk of shapeless clay, by the door, perverting it. The substance dripped obscenely along the rugged planes, the occupants looked on in disgust, as if the desecration was akin to the devil relieving himself in public. 

“What you’re looking for isn’t here.” Sascha took a step forward, and though they were significantly shorter than their partner, they stood defiantly in front of the younger reaper. It was the cinematic record implanted in Augustus upon his suicide some fifty years ago that the demon was sensing, along with every other reaper recruited after the turn of the twentieth century. 

“Then save me the time, and tell me which one of you did it. Which of you unworthy slags reaped the Earl?” There could be no other alternative. He was starved, woke with a fit of anger exceeding that of Agni’s precious Kali. The simplest explanation, the one Occam himself would favour, was that the boy had been stolen from him. 

_And that as a result, he, himself had failed._

So, why did he remember restraining his young master thus? Of licking a stripe up the little liar’s torso with this razored tongue, melting the fabric and splitting him open, spilling his warm, wine-ochred blood? Of soft whines and growls, bestial mouths watering, countless eyes dilating, flesh blackening and shifting, aroused as he held the pulsing heat of the starlit soul in his fiendish hand…

Then there had been... nothing. Void. Abyss. _Home._ And hunger as he had never known. 

“I said…” Sascha tried again, fingering the camera strapped around their neck, and finally breaking the demon’s reverie, “it’s forbidden to speak of it, Michaelis. We’re not granted that kind of clearance, not even...” 

“Yes?” 

Sascha brought the death scythe camera to their white-rimmed glasses, and an unnatural tremor rocked their small frame. Their breath caught, lodged squarely in their throat as the photographic equipment picked up something that even their phosphorescent eyes could not detect. Hell’s creatures, semi-sapient from the look of them, and perfect companions to something as monstrous as a demon. They flanked the devil in the ominous shadow he cast. Like cats, they were ready to strike: their long muscular tails undulated sharply, spasmodically, while their bodies and sleek, oblong heads were so low to the floor, that part of them vanished from the physical plane altogether. For all the reaper knew, the beasts could move through solids with little to no resistance, as if they themselves were made of water. 

Sebastian tilted his head coyly, eyes leaving the reaper he recognized and settling upon the one that he did not. “Go on…” he said hypnotically. 

“N-not even, William knows,” Augustus piped up against his better judgement. He felt Sascha going rigid before him, a gesture he returned by groping his own back pocket, keeping his hand on the gun’s grip when he found it. If they told the demon what he wanted to know, maybe he would go away. “That’s why they scatter--”

“Shut up, flachwichser!” Sascha bellowed, finger frozen on the shutter button, unable to compress it. They saw comprehension flicker across the demon’s face and the will to power that followed. Sebastian Michaelis would go through all of them, collecting the records of his master’s final moments to piece together what had happened. 

It was imperative that they warned everyone, that the reapers present at the Naberius went into hiding as soon as possible, since the infernal abomination did not plan to respect the rules. Where was the damned manager? Likely cowering in his beloved scythe room while they were all about to get slaughtered! If they could just take a picture, and somehow send it with Augustus to safety… of course, that meant they’d be without a scythe. But they were already dead, what worse fate could possibly await them than an eternity of watching mortals die? 

Sebastian advanced on them, and shadows lengthened at his sides, skirting the perimeter of the room with a screeching frequency too faint for all but him to register. The flash on the small reaper’s camera went off with a billowing fantasia of pure white light. It was instinct to evade it, to barricade himself against the deadly, blinding incandescence with the billiards table. No sooner had he picked it up, he let it fall, having been forcefully restrained from behind. 

One glance down was all he needed to realize that the defiled, amorphic statue by the door had not been decor but rather a golem. It had animated stealthily, with the _shem_ most likely concealed in his mouth. 

Sebastian wondered idly who had conjured it to life; there would have been no need for him to hear it, he’d have felt it. But it was neither here nor there at the moment, not while the two babuks came at him while his own mobility so casually restricted. 

He nodded at them both, smiling, “Gentlemen. It seems by the shallow, fluttering heartbeats in the bag you stowed and the lack of sins on the souls from which you made your garments, that we have something in common.” 

“Yeah? And what’s that _duša výhonok_?” the babuk on the left asked, unsnarling the tweed rope from around his waist and fashioning it into a hefty noose. 

“That we both have a…” the demon licked his lips, unbothered by the increasing pressure the golem tried in vain to exert, “a taste for decadence.” 

There was a brief exchange of incredulity between both scarecrows, and the second, riled by discordance, pulled a sharpened pitchfork from the depths of his ankle-length trench. “Yeah? Must be a really powerful demon then, when you could go for any soul, but you settle for a child’s...”

“Oh, forgive my gross generalization; our superficial tastes in prey is likely where our commonalities end. You see, I do not, as you say, ‘ _go for any soul_ ’, and I certainly do not settle.”

The demon’s tendrils flitted the floor, darkening and materializing when they crept up against the first babuk’s body. It twined, leathery and vine-like, smothering the creature with the same intensity as the golem’s grasp. He dragged the bubak forward who caterwauling from the sheer torment of the tendril’s unhinged constriction. 

“Does this hurt?” Sebastian inquired softly, unperturbed by both his own confinement and the bubak’s yowl of pain. “It seems more a gentle caress to me.” 

The demon scented the clothes worn by the struggling monster and wrinkled his nose in distaste. “As I was saying, your lot lacks refinement. Your _ensemble_ hasn’t any trace of pretension.” Sebastian’s lip curled the longer he examined them. “ Your victims were frightened, spineless, obedient little lambs. What you wear speaks to whom you are, and do you know what this says in particular?”

As the mindless mass of clay behind Sebastian changed its tactic by seizing the devil’s neck; the bubak’s eyes bulged with a similar strain. He was unable to respond with more than unintelligent bawling. The mirrored twin, incapable of standing idly any longer, drove his pitchfork into the dense tendril strangling his copy to rescue him. It cut into the demon painlessly and from the wound it caused, a noxious gas was discharged. The reapers recoiled immediately, retreating to the faraway corner, choking and gagging. 

Sascha let slip the camera from their grasp to cover their nose and the flash caught both babuks in the throes of identical convulsive agony, instead of its intended target. The monsters’ flesh burst aflame, and the souls they wore, weak with incendiary purity, merely fuelled the pyre. 

“It says, you’re not worth your salt,” Sebastian simpered, starving the fire of oxygen with a trifling inhalation. The resulting expansion of the devil’s ribs carved deep fissures into the golem’s rocky arm, and at the least provocation, they broke apart, the clay falling to the floor in fragments, disintegrating into dust. 

Sascha scrambled for their camera again, and though the golem was roughly the height of Michaelangelo’s David, Sebastian gripped its waist behind himself and flipped him over his head. The chandelier was knocked off its reinforced collars, and live wires rained sparks down on them. The crash further fractured the golem, splintering and shaking the floor beneath them, causing both reapers to lose their footing. 

The devil watched in slow-motion as Sascha’s scythe fumbled from their hands, heard the click of the shutter button unwittingly depressed, and braced himself for the grisly gash that should come. Already, his devil’s flesh reinforced itself, knitting tight coils over the other; remembering all too acutely the irritating agony of a silver curved blade cutting through him aboard the Campania. 

But the pain never came. Instead, outside of the darkened window, a faint crack in the distance, followed by a whizzing sound sent shattered glass tinkling to the ground as a seemingly stray bullet grazed the camera’s lens. It spun, changing the apparatus’ trajectory to catch its owner by surprise. 

Sascha’s face froze in a soundless scream; it told of the hopelessness that led to their suicide and of their confusion upon re-awakening. Then, like exposed film, their body blurred around the edges, colours bleeding out into an isochromatic mess, first at fingers and toes and working inwards. What lost its hue, lost life, ceased to move. The reaper was little more stone than the golem. 

Holding the struggling clay steadily on its knees before him, Sebastian cocked his head, a captive audience to the reaper’s demise. Morbid curiosity and amusement lit his face, absorbing the wasted colour. 

Augustus did not react until Sascha’s eyes lost their phosphorescence and dulled to a lifeless grey. His delay made one thing clear: the young reaper might have been accustomed to a variety of human mortalities and trained to endure a certain level of carnage, but the death of death was not something he had ever had the privilege of witnessing. With trembling hands, he drew his gun on the demon and aimed it at his head. 

Sebastian barked a raucous laugh, unconsciously pulverizing the stone monster with tendrillar coils. They drilled through the golem, responding to his mirth with enthusiasm, burying it slowly, but surely in its own dirt. 

“My, my… the firearms of today might have improved greatly in terms of power, but I doubt they have improved _that much_.” 

“You’d be surprised,” Augustus replied decisively calm and pulled the trigger. 

A series of three shots sped towards the demon, unnaturally fast. But if the bullets moved as light did, what broke through the window and knocked Sebastian down was faster, mimicking the darkness of the expanding universe. 

A slim, young woman of medium height with cherry wood hair and complimentary, gleaming hazel eyes, straddled Sebastian’s waist. Without so much as twisting where she sat, she drew her sterling skulled rifle over her opposite shoulder and emptied a magazine into the offending party, striking ten non-fatal points. 

“I finally have you beneath me, Sebastian,” Mey-rin said in a devilishly playful tone. 

“Maid,” the demon said by way of greeting, bucking her off with ease. She exuded an inhuman grace as she righted herself, dusting off her knee-length boots from the rubble that lay next to the stone head. Sebastian spared a glance to the wailing reaper, writhing excruciatingly against the bar, then appraised his fellow servant with familiar condescension. “I see you have forgotten your role? Or has your memory become as poor as your domestic skills?” 

Immediately, Mey-rin’s confidence shrank and she blushed furiously. “No. No, Mister Sebastian,” she replied in her maid’s screeching voice. “Is this better?” 

“Indeed. Now, for what reason did you see fit to interrupt my little game?” He bent to pick up the golem’s head, its eyes pleading him to just end it. To leave the part which harboured the shem for last was a kind of slow torture for such a being. The demon obliged the anthropomorphic brute, but more out of boredom than anything else; he was ready to move on from this room -- almost. He ripped the rock in two as if it were paper and set fire to god’s name prior to swallowing it whole. 

“Just kill him,” Augustus called out for Mey-Rin, his life force seeping out of him and rotting the wood where he lay. “He’s here to kill us all.” 

Both butler and maid ignored the dying reaper, in favour of examining the damage his ammunition had done to the wall. Mey-Rin dug her fingers into the divots, using blackened claws to eke them out. She dropped them into Sebastian’s open hand, whereupon he recognized them for what they really were. 

“These were forged from a death scythe?”

Mey-Rin examined her own rifle; the one she’d taken as a trophy from the last reaper who’d crossed her path. “Yes, right surprised I was, when I first came across them fifty years ago. The German detachment finally wised up; bullets are faster than reapers, after all.” 

“But not faster than demons, it seems.” Sebastian suppressed an arrogant smirk, turning the bullets over in his palm. They had been blessed with a Tetragrammaton at their tips which were no larger than the sharp end of a needle. He gave them back to Mey-Rin who pocketed them. 

With some hesitancy and a healthy dose of fear, she asked her superior, “Have you found the young master?” 

“No. Not yet.” Sebastian advanced on the reaper, whose ragged breath resembled a chainsaw. He shuddered at the thought of _that_ particular scythe. He crouched next to Augustus, with the maid to his left, and together, they sat the reaper upright. 

Augustus spat blood and gasped for air. On his tongue, the taste of chocolate cake was heavy. In front of his eyes, his vision swam. He saw bicoloured eyes devouring a meal, and a small hand adorned with gold, clutching a fork. He heard _Chaconne_ by Vitali, a flawless violin serenade at the little lord’s side. 

Then the reaper choked. Long fingers had forced their way into his mouth and to the back of his throat. From within, he felt compression and stretching, a singularity pulling roughly at the fibres of memories that were not his own. He gagged, trying to dislodge the obstruction, but it persisted, until finally, it was wrenched out, slicing organs and soft tissue on its way up. 

Augustus stared vacantly forward, then towards the ceiling as he was crudely released. Sebastian’s fingers pinched one end of his young master’s cinematic record and held it up towards the night’s cimmerian shade to better read it. He clicked his tongue most disapprovingly. “How boring,” he muttered to himself, crumpling the filmstrip and feeding it to his pet.

He said no more to Mey-Rin and she took it as her dismissal. Collecting Sascha’s camera, she leapt nimbly to the window’s ledge. “Bard is here as well, somewhere,” she told him. “Let us know when you find the Earl, won’t you? That much is owed to us.” And with that, she was gone. 

The record, now binding itself to him, burned pleasantly at his core. It yearned for its brothers, to be connected filmstrip to filmstrip to tell its story. How many of them would it take to explain his aching starvation satisfactorily? He would settle for no less than all of them. He would store them inside of himself, take great care of them until such a time that _Ciel Phantomhive_ was reborn, for with an incomplete memory, the earl could not claim vengeance; and the devil was damned if he was starting over.

Mister Kadar hadn’t been exaggerating; the streets actually grew darker the closer they got to Whitehall Court.

Ciel thought it comforting. 

Even as a child, he had preferred night to day; when the former receded the horizon, the latter expanded the universe, made it limitless, freed him from the feeling that he was caged. Darkness was a constant companion, always reaching him before light did when he woke from a nightmare. It was everywhere, behind his eyes, behind the stars, filling holes, taking refuge in the shadows. It softened reality’s rough edges and dulled too-vivid colours. 

It soothed. It shrouded. 

Like a secret. Like a mask. 

“You haven’t spoken in five minutes, what are you thinking?” Finny asked, pulling up to the Horseguards valet, waving off the uniformed young man offering to take the car. 

“Shakespeare,” Ciel muttered, eyes boring into the utter lightlessness of the early morning. Around him, the neighbourhood slept; only the hotel showed signs of life; the ground floor was well lit, and he could see people moving beyond the front doors. 

To his right, Finny got out of the car to fetch something from the trunk. When he returned, Ciel had not moved, except to breathe. Both of his hands were on his lap, holding a ring box containing a compilation of information that his client had requested, minus Kelvin’s untimely assassination. Finny took it from him, replacing it with a circular box, a traditional hat one. It was vintage, circa 1885, bound in leather the colour of rust. When Ciel opened it, purple silk, like that found in a coffin, nuzzled a delicate porcelain mask inside. 

“We haven’t read Shakespeare since we were homeschooled by Tanaka,” Finny prompted. 

“ _You_ haven’t read Shakespeare since we were homeschooled by Tanaka,” Ciel retorted, holding the obsidian raven mask to his face with one hand, and pulling the band over his head and securing it at the back with the other. 

As per usual, Finny helped with the snares the elastic band had made in Ciel’s slate hair. “Just tell me you aren’t thinking of Hamlet, Julius Cesar or King Le--”

“It’s Macbeth.”

Finny groaned, dry washing his face as his head fell back against the seat. “Of course it is. I don’t think it’s wise for us to be here, Ciel. It doesn’t _feel_ right. Can’t you sense it?”

Ciel definitely could, but he chalked it up to nerves: to the adrenaline still running amok in his body from having killed someone; not as a result of his personal responsibility for the death of a person because Kelvin was hardly that, but rather that he felt very little guilt about having done it. Maybe it was too early to feel remorse? He might still be in shock. It had taken him over two weeks to register the fact that his parents had died. 

“Out, damn’d spot! out, I say! Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” Finny recited expertly from memory, but ruined it by concluding the monologue as a question. “If you’re worried about Kelvin...”

“I’m not,” Ciel answered too quickly. He lowered the mirror of the sun visor and adjusted the mask over his face, holding it by the wings, so that the raven’s singular eye was his own cerulean one. The pupil was dilated, eclipsing a thin blue iris. He was alert like the bird of prey that was his mark, excited by the prospect of how the evening’s work would reward him, of finding out more about his parent’s demise, of entering a space, that up until now, had been strictly off-limits to him. 

With his face now partially obscured to satisfaction, he turned to Finny and flashed a patronizing smile, “Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.” 

Finny stuck the ring box into a cognac messenger bag he’d retrieved from the trunk along with the hatbox, and when Ciel was ready to step out, he handed it to him. “Good luck. Text me if you wrap up early.” He hesitated, but the need to impress the wrongness that he felt about the situation was stronger than he was. “If you’re not out in twenty minutes, I’m coming in.” 

Ciel snorted, opening the McLaren’s door. “Right.” He’d spent the better part of the last five years trying to access the posh establishment, only to be turned away at the door every single time. How Finny expected to simply walk in, was beyond him. 

The masked young man stepped out of the car and shivered. The increased darkness seemed to have brought with it a significant drop in temperature. He hitched the bag over his shoulder and drew his thigh-length jacket more snuggly around his small form. Once Finny drove off, he was alone outside, but with the company of two doormen, one of which he recognized right away. He was hard to forget with eyes too large for an ordinary human face, and their vertical distance to his too large mouth was eerily unsettling. However, tonight, his appearance was even more ghastly; he looked agitated by disfigurement, as though his skin was trying in vain to recover from the kind of burn only caused by the coldest of gales. 

Ciel chose to avert his eyes and nodded casually to the doorman who had not denied him entry half a dozen times. Two things happened simultaneously: the doorman whom Ciel had greeted gave a welcoming quarter-bow and pushed the door open to the lobby of the Royal Horseguards, while the other more grisly one put his arm out to stop Ciel from entering. 

“Excuse me,” Ciel faltered, glowering despite himself at the uncanny one, muttering god’s Hebrew name under his breath in frustration. 

Having heard Ciel, the doorman cocked a bushy brow and when he responded, it was with a voice that suggested he’d recently screamed himself hoarse, “Be careful of your curses child, for they have power. It is but one of the many reasons you have been blacklisted from this establishment. You know this, don’t you, Mr. Phantomhive?” 

Ciel’s neutral expression reflected nothing of the shock he felt inside. His mind reeled, balking at the doorman’s recognition of him in his masked state. “You must have mistaken me for someone else,” he objected, “now kindly remove your arm from my person, before I speak to the manager.” 

The offensive doorman ignored the threat, and instead leaned in, speaking in a shallow murmur that mimicked his breath. “If you value your life, it is in your best interest to call your driver and leave immediately. You’ll find no information here, only more questions to which you do not want answers.” 

Ciel’s mouth opened, a witty retort dying on his tongue, some Camusian nonsense about fate and scorn, when a stretched shadow blended with his own on the cobblestone. It preceded an impeccably dressed man sporting a heavy black and gold sherwani not suiting the Indian subcontinent from which it doubtlessly originated; but in London’s dead of winter, it did not seem out of place. 

“Mr. Kadar,” Ciel greeted, confidently holding out his wounded hand. It throbbed still, but he could move his fingers, so it might not be broken. 

“Corvis, I presume?” he answered, shaking Ciel’s hand firmly. 

He held Ciel’s hand longer than was normal for new acquaintances. In fact, Ciel had the chance to swallow his pain down twice in the time that it took for his client to release it. He tried to focus on something else instead, like how Kadar wasn’t much older than himself, if at all. Strands of darkest plum glinted in his hair, which fell to his shoulders, framing a kindly, boyish face, even under his closely trimmed three-day stubble beard. His warm, golden eyes sparkled with unshed tears that Ciel attributed to the bite of the arctic wind bustling down the street. 

Awkward and uncomfortable with the drawn-out physical contact, Ciel took a step back, worried an embrace was coming next. “Yes. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.” 

“As it is mine,” Kadar replied thickly. His eyes lingered on Ciel’s mask a few moments, as though trying to see through it, or perhaps, for any sign of recognition. When none existed, he added, “However, I would be more comfortable if you addressed me as _Prince_.”

 _Prince_? Was he actually dealing with nobility, or was this a self-imposed nickname? His research had found nothing of the sort. Regardless, Ciel decided to proceed with even more caution; if Machiavelli had taught him anything, it was that princes valued cruelty over mercy, were selfish rather than generous and would break promises if keeping them meant going against their interests.

“Of course, Prince…”

“Soma,” the prince urged, his lips upturned. 

“Prince Soma,” Ciel repeated by way of agreement. He would call the handsome stranger _Queen Elizabeth_ if it would speed up their interaction. He wanted time to explore the infamous hotel on his own. “I was under the impression that you were already here when we last spoke.”

“And so I was. I thought you might have difficulty at the door. The Horseguards is very exclusive after hours, and you will find that you are not alone in trying to conceal your identity. Why don’t we move this meeting out of this cold? No matter how many times I return to London, I can’t seem to get used to it.” Soma rubbed his hands together, blowing hotly onto them as he led the way. 

Ciel dithered behind him, and the prince noticed when he didn’t hear anyone following him. “He’ll not stop you if you’re with me,” Soma said. 

“I’m afraid I must insist,” the odd doorman disputed, as the other kept his silence. “The manager has indicated…”

“You _do_ know who I am, don’t you? I outrank your manager,” Soma said, and for the first time, Ciel heard a note of regal authority in his words. “Do we need to involve the Maven, Mister DeSatori?” 

“No, Sir. Absolutely not, Sir.” 

“Very well. Corvis, after you,” Soma said, waving Ciel ahead. 

Ciel watched Mister DeSatori hold the door open and wondered half-heartedly how he had injured his poorly bandaged hand. Not all five digits could be accounted for, unless he had bent two of them, but the rest stood at odd angles. This gave him pause, made him think that perhaps if both of them had sustained a similar injury this evening, that he should heed the doorman’s warning. No, it was merely a coincidence. He gave a little shrug as he walked passed and resolved to think about it no more. 

Inside, the maître d’ offered to take their jackets, and both men refused. At the prince’s request, they were ushered to a table dead center of the lavish dining room, in plain sight of the smattering of guests currently engrossed in deep conversation, dispersed here and there in the great room. 

The space was large, unintimate, and Ciel worried that they would be overheard. It looked more like a ballroom than anything else, boasting vaulted ceilings embellished with scalloped edging and thick, midnight velvet drapes pulled back over French windows. The eight or so tiered crystal chandeliers glittered, illuminating the room much too brightly for his taste, further robbing him of privacy; it would be best to get this over with as soon as possible. 

The prince, however, seemed to have other ideas; he splayed the burgundy linen napkin over his lap, ordered a decanter of Chateau Margaux with a snap of his fingers at the wait staff and began to peruse the dessert menu that had been set on his gold-edged service plate prior to their arrival.

“You know, the first time I saw snow, I thought it was so beautiful that I wanted to take it back home to show my mother,” Soma said, opening up the conversation, but not taking his eyes off the menu. 

Across from him, Ciel fished out the small ring box from his bag, but before he could offer it, he dropped it onto the table, having been startled by a sudden shaking of the room and rumbling overhead. He drew in a sharp breath and clutched the seat of his own chair. Nobody else so much as gazed skywards. To his left, a silver-haired beauty complained animatedly about spots on his fork to his waiter, _‘I’ll bring you another one right away, Mr. Redmond.’_ To his right, a barrel-chested, mountain of a man bickered in German over his phone; Ciel’s rudimentary knowledge of the language only caught the word _witch_ in the urgent exchange. 

Finny had been right, there was something off about the Horseguards. How had they missed the equivalent to a small bomb going off? Even the prince looked unruffled. He pointed to his selection on the menu as a waitress poured wine first into his glass, and then into Ciel’s. Once she left, Ciel opened his mouth to speak, but was cut off. 

“You still like chocolate cake, don’t you, _Corvis_?” 

“I -- What?” 

The prince drew a match from his pocket and lit the unnecessary candle that served as centerpiece. The flame flickered between them and behind it, Soma’s appearance shifted. There were flashes of a younger version, one without the distraction of facial hair. Instead, the baby-faced teen had a smile that rivalled the stars, some of which resided in his eyes. Long tousled hair was piled loosely atop his head, revealing large gold earrings that Ciel did not remember seeing on the prince when they’d initially met. 

Ciel blinked the image from his sight, licked the tips of his thumb and forefinger and unapologetically snuffed the candle out. 

“I mean,” the prince stammered, “everyone loves chocolate, don’t they?”

“I daresay that most do, Prince, but I’m rather busy this evening; you’ll have to enjoy it without me.” Ciel picked up the ring box and held it out for his client, ignoring the expression of abject disappointment that washed over Soma’s face. If Ciel wasn’t so drained by the night’s events, if he wasn’t starting to question his own sanity, he would have gladly accepted the invitation; after all, it was the least that he could do after having bungled the Kelvin mission. The gravity of the situation was only dawning on him now that he had the time to digest it. How would the priest’s demise affect Prince Soma’s plans here on out? How would he and Finny go about disposing of Kelvin’s body once this meeting was done? What would his therapist, Doctor Doyle have to say about his _new_ hallucinations? Surely he’d want Ciel medicated again; it was best not to say anything, not even to Finny with whom he was closest. 

Ciel steepled his fingers, tapping the tips of his indexes -- a nervous reaction to the news he was about to deliver. He rearranged his features into something harder, narrowing his eyes. “I have good news, and I have bad news, Prince Soma.”

“Oh?” The man’s tone was petulant, still put out by Ciel’s rejection. “Good news first, please.”

“I was able to fetch the information you required, and then some. On the chip inside this box, you’ll find visuals of the priest’s lofty second home, as well as priceless artifacts that are in his possession. I was also able to access his financial records for the past decade to confirm your suspicions.”

“That’s wonderful! And what of the bad news?” 

“You must know, given my line of work, that I also have a fair bit of information on my clients.” Ciel’s hands were out in mock supplication on the table. “This is a means by which I protect myself, as well as those who work for me. As such, should any information rendered to you be connected with _Inhuminitas_ , yours will be leaked. And quite publicly too.” 

“Ah, blackmail. How nostalgic,” Soma sighed. “This is it for bad news? You needn’t worry, _Corvis_ , the information I requested regarding Kelvin was for my own curiosity, rather than serving a larger cause.” 

That was a relief, Ciel thought. He’d doctored the video on the drive over as best he could to sever his association with the man’s death, but the Prince would no doubt hear of Kelvin’s disappearance soon enough and he would figure out… “No, Prince. There is more…” 

Soma did an about-face, his calm demeanour replaced by fervid excitement, it quivered his whispered question, so soft that Ciel could scarcely hear it over the scraping of nearby forks and knives over expensive china. “You killed him, didn’t you?”

“How did you…” Ciel breathed tremulously, standing abruptly from the table, letting his bag fall to the floor. He felt everyone’s eyes on him, like a thousand moths’ unblinking eyespots. 

“Why do you think I sent you? You were always meant to destroy that monster. In every single one of your incarnations.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This work would be nothing without the might beta powers of @teasmudge -- her comments, suggestions and writing prowess really make a huge difference to this work! 
> 
> I'd also like to thank @scarlet-la-rose for alllll the time she spent helping to format t-stray's amazing art into the story to make it look more professional. I really appreciate everything you've done! 
> 
>   
> 
> ㅤCharacter Sketch of Xenomorphs  
> ㅤFor Rust and Stardust  
> ㅤBy: [T-stray](https://t-stray.tumblr.com)  
>   
> ㅤInspired by H. R. Giger


	5. Albireo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The doors had only closed and Ciel blurted the question he’d had about the paintings before he could be distraught into forgetting again. But it was the screech of the Danse Macabre’s solo violin that answered, rather than the orotund voice that Ciel was quickly, albeit mysteriously becoming accustomed to.
> 
> It caught both men off guard, but Ciel reacted faster, pushing the Prince roughly into the mirrored panel and pinning him with his weight. His arm came up, jamming itself hard against the Prince’s throat to stifle any sound he would make. The _diabolus in musica_ of the song was repeating itself as Ciel threatened a growl, “I’ve killed once tonight already, and I feel no remorse. Now, tell me why you have my mobile in your pocket.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  
> 
>   
> 
> 
> Title: Albireo  
> By: [T-stray](https://t-stray.tumblr.com)  
> Paintool Sai and ClipStudioPaint  
> Character (c) Yana Toboso  
> 
> 
> **Music Inspiration**  
> [Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyknBTm_YyM)  
> [Dies irae, Libera me by Giuseppe Verdi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jBLyIQvNf0)

_“The best weapons are extensions of ourselves,” Sebastian told the young lord in the forest behind the manor, as he taught him how to how to use a rifle. His chest was pressed against the earl’s back, his chin brushing just over the crown of his master’s head, ignoring the breeze that disturbed the slate, sweet-scented hair sticking out from under his flat cap. Sebastian’s arms framed his pupil’s, large hands over small, bearing the majority of the weapon’s weight. Taking aim at foraging prey, he breathed, “When you aim your gun, you must be so confident in your target that you no longer see the barrel, only what must succumb. When you embrace the trigger, you release your primeval urges. You embody death, you become the gun.”_

But his words had been frivolous. The young master was no more a gun, than he, a demon of absolute rebellion, was a handful of butter knives. 

No, if anything, the little earl was a well-stocked library, an arsenal of sacred weaponry of the most dangerous kind. Like a library, his power could not be attributed to his size, but rather the measure of his knowledge. His intimidation relied upon the breadth of his possessed calm and organized thoughts. He was judiciously discerning; allowed people into his life in the same way a library of scrupulous logic could only house beneficial publications. For this, he remained aloof, was neither child nor adult, alive nor dead, stood equidistant from both past and future. _Athenaeum: the seat of intellectual refinement._

And so Sebastian was not at all surprised that the call of the young master’s soul led him to a library. Though stoic, the earl had been a sickly, fragile youth; as such, the library became a sort of hospice for his mind. 

This one in particular, aptly designated _Bibliothēca Obizuth_ , featured an inlaid bust of the library’s namesake over the door’s curved arch. The demon, Obizuth, said to closely resemble the gorgon Medusa with all that venomed hair, cast her barren, unmoving stare at the entrance -- an imagery made popular at the gates of Victorian homes. Hers was a symbol that deterred evil; it was why Perseus had made her head a part of his shield after killing her. Either she resided here now as a warning for all that dared enter, or whatever she guarded within was sacrosanct, to be protected. 

He scoffed, pushing the doors open. The hotel manager might just as well have posted a neon sign that read: _Look no further than here for your young master!_ The library was not simply a symbolic representation of Phantomhive Manor; it looked as though the Naberius’ architect had taken great pains to fashion the library after the aesthetic of the young master’s study. 

Of course it was larger, and held more books than the floor to ceiling shelves that adorned the walls of his contractor’s work space. The bibliothēca was a labyrinthine chamber, made up of a series of mini offices: burning candles with wax dripping onto great oak desks, the former laden with stacks of paper, quills and inkwells, ready to be used. Plush armchairs, comfortable for sleeping, let alone work, were present at every station, which sat upon garnet rugs thrown over stripped hardwood. It was as though each was a reflected tessellation, a repeated pattern broken only by shelving and hints of periodic tilting. The effect was vexing. 

And then it was surreal. 

The more Sebastian stalked through the empty library, the more details he registered. The rug was worn at the same spot in every section, _the very same spot,_ down to the millimeter, as if someone had stood there one too many times. It was where he had positioned himself as the Phantomhive butler: behind the young man, but to the left, like the devil on his shoulder. In this manner, he would always be ready, should any foe come through the door. Just the same, he was certainly close enough to take any hit that might come from behind the shadow of his back, where the posterior window bathed the young lord in sunlight or moonlight. Protecting the earl was reflex, like breathing for humans; and so, at times his attention wavered. He enjoyed busying himself by listening to patches of long grass parted by foxes on the chase, or else the birds of prey calling out to the sky with their stiffly wings, riding along the various currents of English air. 

Simultaneously, he kept track of his charge’s vital signs. Felt the earl’s temperature rise and fall as the day progressed, saw the gentle beating of his pulse behind his ear tucked beneath the silk of his hair, unconsciously kept track of his respiration. 

Satisfied with the young man’s health, his focus shifted to reading the spines of the earl’s vast collection and recommitting them to memory: _The Moonstone_ , _On the Origin of Species_ , _Bleak House_ , countless Conan Doyle, Thoreau and penny dreadfuls scattered among them. He recited passages from each to himself, from having either read to his master or having read over his shoulder. 

This homeostatic trance was often broken by his contractor. At times, the earl was frustrated and sent his papers to the floor. Or he was hungry and his stomach demanded satiation before he himself ordered it verbally. But most often, it was a fit of clumsiness that distracted the demon: spilled ink darkening the oak on the young lummox’s right side. His instinctive attempt to soak the gooping blackness with a kerchief only made more of a mess; it rubbed the iron salts and tannic acids into the wood and never again came out. 

The library’s designer saw to that as well. Sebastian’s annoyance evolved into aggression. Was the Naberius paying homage to him, or was it making a mockery of him? A desk or five were overturned: his pets’ doing as they surged from one to the other. They choked the candles’ flames as they passed, darkening the library from the entrance onwards the deeper they delved. The demon’s shadow preceded him, snarling along with his xenomorphic counterparts, turning sharply down one aisle, vertical-slitted crimson eyes darting down another, always following that insatiable pull. 

Until he stood in front of it. He should have known; it suited Earl Phantomhive’s soul to find a well-deserved repose among the books he so love. 

Especially this one. 

Sebastian’s gloved finger caressed the book’s spine like a lover, each embossed gold letter that made up the title, a bony projection of a human vertebrae. 

_Read me,_ it supplicated seductively, turning hot under his touch. _Spread my pages, see what fills me inside._

Its siren’s call was potent, and how apropos. It was a handsome book with a distressed, forest green canvas cover on which was scrawled _The Odyssey_ in beautiful calligraphic lettering. Each page was gilded, and smelled strongly of Watchdog. He inhaled it, holding it in his lungs. The remaining books trembled on their shelves, seeming to recede deeper into their space for fear that they too, would be selected. They needn’t worry, _this_ was the only tome that spoke to his ineffable monstrousness, a trait it held in common with the young master’s soul. Had he been lured from his long slumber for such a morsel? Was he blindly sailing into death’s arms again, much like Homer’s sailors into those of the ghastly creatures perched bewitchingly upon the stony crags of the sea?

“Please do forgive me,” his voice subdued the book, as he opened it gently, parting the pages at the centermost point, “this is a matter of some urgency, after all.” 

Alone, his eyes reacted, pupils dilating from slits to saucers.

Ten seconds never seemed so long. It took only ten seconds for Ciel to hack into someone’s account, or transfer their life savings to a Swiss bank account, or upload damning photographic evidence onto the world wide web. And that was just the trivial stuff he did before breakfast.

But as he stood there dead center of the dining room, heart alliterating a discordant elegy, it dawned on him: his life had been altered by a series of ten second intervals. In the breaths that it took for a wrist watch to _tic, tic, tic, tic, tic, tic, tic, tic, tic, tic_ , a couple could be slain, a heart could be broken, a child could be orphaned, a soul could be sold. 

_A soul could be sold._ How odd to think of such a thing now. Surely, it was a stress reaction. Besides, a soul could not be sold. One could not affix a value to something that did not exist. He was not the sort of atheist that could overlook a lack of evidence when it came to dualism, no matter how romantic the notion of immortality was. _Ridiculous._

“Please sit,” Kadar mitigated, voice low and smooth as if he were trying to talk down a Hornsey Lane Bridge jumper. “Allow me to explain.” 

A hard, challenging stare full of judgement, the kind that that could just a chin and make a jaw tight, was Ciel’s initial answer. If the Prince had so much as five brain cells, he could see that everything about his dinner guest screamed _defiance_. When Ciel didn’t abide by his request, Kadar rose, standing at least a head taller. With difficulty, owing to his mask, Ciel saw the large German man appraise him over his shoulder, not as a threat, but as an annoyance. 

He’d also newly drawn the attention of some pastel-goth wannabe who had made quite the anti-climactic entrance, his shaggy lavender hair windswept with flecks of snow, or was it glitter? It might have been the former; it scintillated off his cloak like the silver sharpied constellations pockmarking his arms. He too shot Ciel a look of deep interest; his lapis eyes widened maniacally and his mouth dropped like Icarus out of the sky. Right then and there, Ciel decided that this was not an interaction he could stomach tonight. 

“Right. I’ll give you five minutes, _Prince Kadar_ ,” Ciel smeared the name, picking up the bag he’d let fall and tucking it under his arm, “and not a minute more.” 

“B-but I’ve ordered us cake,” the Prince protested incredulously, seemingly shocked that _anyone_ would pass up on the opportunity, much less his guest. “Chocolate cake. The kind that has the soft center, you know, it oozes out when you break it in the middle?” He looked longingly at his empty serving plate, back at Ciel, then to the plate again. 

Ciel moistened his lips despite himself. Stupid Pavlovian response! If he’d managed to break himself of cigarette smoking and chronic masturbation, how could he not rid himself of the automatic euphoria that filled his mouth, and spread centripetally in a rush of saccharine heat? Already, his stomach was rumbling beneath his jacket, and he consciously resolved not to pat it soothingly. 

Instead, he would call the Prince’s bluff. He was no longer content to simply look around the present room; he came here to see what else the Horseguards was hiding and to receive payment from his contractor in the form of information. He saw no reason why this could not be done while walking.

Repressing his chocolate pang, Ciel swallowed and dug his hand into his pocket, in search of his mobile. “Suit yourself. Have your cake and I’ll call my driver to swing around the front.” 

He was fortunate. Within the heartbeat it took for the Prince to reply with a desperate _‘Wait!_ , Ciel realized his phone was not on his person, despite being absolutely sure that he had taken it with him. He was never without it. _Mother Finnian_ would never allow that. Subtly, he swept his foot under the table to see if it had tumbled when he’d stood abruptly. He even backed half a meter to have a better look. It most definitely was not there. _Damn it to hell!_ Of all the times -- how was he supposed to take pictures? Google anything if necessary? 

“Perhaps you will better understand what I mean, if I show you rather than tell you? It certainly helped me…” The Prince was thoughtful, narrowed his eyes and took his bottom lip between his teeth as he seemed to consider a world of possibilities. “No. No… not that,” he muttered. When Ciel opened his mouth again to press the issue, his patron boastfully interrupted, snapping his ringed fingers in triumph. “Come, allow me to reacquaint you with the Queen. I daresay you’ll be happy to see her again.” 

Unimpressed with name dropping, or England’s monarchy as a whole, Ciel gave a curt nod and indicated that the Prince should lead. He apprehensively followed the taller man to the back of the dining room, walking in silence over the checkerboard merola tile of the empty hall. He resisted the urge to only step on the white tiles, like it had been a childish game he had played once upon a time. 

It hadn’t been. Both Rachel and Vincent Phantomhive had vehemently hated the dichromatic pattern and refused to have such an atrocity in their home. To Ciel it was _familiar_. There was an intellectual beauty to its organization, in the same way chess had its aesthetics. 

With every echoing step they took, Ciel felt more grounded, more in control of himself, ready and braced for this meeting of the Prince’s. Since he’d been so distracted by the flooring, it was only when they were nearing the lift at the end of the hall that Ciel realized the walls on either side were adorned with recessed niches displaying oil paintings of ancient vases, each with its own symbol, not unlike the one he’d found at Kelvin’s. 

As the Prince called the elevator, Ciel faced the way they’d come, counting the nooks. _Twelve. Six on each side._ He turned to ask Kadar if he knew what they were, when he caught their reflection in the brass surface of the lift doors. Disregarding the natural displacement of light, the odd curvature in the handles, and other laws of physics Ciel honestly had not taken the time to commit to memory, he appeared much shorter than his counterpart, even though he knew logically that no such gap existed between them. He glanced to his right where the Prince stood, and then to the front again and the image had not changed, except for the faint russet of a shadow outlining the stance of each man: one menacingly possessive, one adoringly doting. 

He shivered, tiny hairs spiking on his arms as it became clear which of the two stood behind his reflection. He blinked, actually lifted his hand to rub his eyes when it hit the mask instead. Relief flooded him when the doors parted, taking with them the disconcerting illusion. 

The doors had only closed and Ciel blurted the question he’d had about the paintings before he could be distraught into forgetting again. But it was the screech of the [Danse Macabre](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyknBTm_YyM)’s solo violin that answered, rather than the orotund voice that Ciel was quickly, albeit mysteriously becoming accustomed to. 

It caught both men off guard, but Ciel reacted faster, pushing the Prince roughly into the mirrored panel and pinning him with his weight. His arm came up, jamming itself hard against the Prince’s throat to stifle any sound he would make. The _diabolus in musica_ of the song was repeating itself as Ciel threatened a growl, “I’ve killed once tonight already, and I feel no remorse. Now, tell me why you have my mobile in your pocket.”

When humans cry, a simple fluid mists their eyes and spills over in salted drops, staining their faces with the traces of their miserable, short-lived evolution. As if to mimic their lives, their tears are carelessly capricious, wasted on reflex, pain, and at times, joy. But on the day the demons wept, they bled tears of alchemy. Theirs were not associated with peace, of which blue is often symbolic. Instead, they were cold, hard, born of hate and imprisonment. They fell in short, spectral wavelengths and high wailing frequencies. And this pleased Solomon. With the help of the Heavenly Host, he collected their tears and scattered the evidence of their captivity deep underground, where they resurfaced millennia later as sapphires.

These precious gemstones were prominently featured atop engagement rings, their meaning having been lost in translation somewhere along the way. They were not, as lovers might presume, a denotation of faithfulness, but of slavery. Why else would monarchies, predating the rise of Great Britain, to its Albion roots in Caesar’s Roman Empire, gift the infamous piece to the firstborn of Phantomhive, generation after generation? This was a Watchdog’s tether. One was to serve, or else perish trying. 

It was therefore no surprise to Sebastian that he had been so aptly able to remedy the earl’s ring while under his care; its essence, was after all, his own. 

From within the small compartment carved into the pages of _The Odyssey_ , the demon gathered the familiar blue stone. His reaction was similar to that of his master’s whenever the young man suffered trauma to his flesh -- he recoiled at the sight of his own blood, but never flinched at that of others. Though the gem was small, no larger than a singular forget-me-not, its weight was considerable, since demons tears were not measured in stones, but indignation. 

Glaring, he rolled it between thumb and forefinger, the pressure and heat exerted making the sapphire more brilliant than it had ever been, indistinguishable from _Albireo_. There was no denying his ownership of it, yet it was vastly different than when he’d held it last. First, because it was no longer adhered to that gaudy silver ring, and second because while it wasn’t in possession of his last master, the unfortunate scent of its original royal proprietor was cloying. His revulsion was only deterred by the faintest hint of Phantomhive still clinging to the mineral. 

No. It lacked an arrogant redolence that the Phantomhives bred into their heirs. By contrast, this one was softer, but no less determined. A blood relative. A close one. Surely that was impossible. To his knowledge, the young man had not fathered any children that would have led to direct descendants. 

From behind came a series of six heartbeats, and a flowing down-up waltz rhythm. The demon pocketed the gemstone and slowly set the book on the shelf. He inhaled deeply, pinching the bridge of his nose in exasperation. He had about as much patience to consort with lesser beings, than he did with humans that were not his food. 

“How insolent of you to disturb the silence with your caterwauling,” he muttered irritably, turning on the spot, but saw nothing. 

An invisible weight charged at Sebastian, pushing him flush against the tall shelf, rocking it back and causing books to fall from the other side. 

The demon grunted, watched in disinterest as his arms were pulled to his sides and his feet were bound together by imperceptible hands. _A real, modern-day martyr, how predictable for their kind,_ he thought. Still, he humoured the entities, let them tilt his head skywards, unfasten the tie at his neck and roll up his shirtsleeves. Human pulse points. 

Motionless at his sides, Sebastian’s hellspawns kept silent, awaiting their master’s command. And yet, they made their presence known with identical, salivating snarls; it was likely why the three strigoi had not begun to feast. 

“If we are going by rules, Michaelis, then allow us to remind you that pets are not permitted here,” a metallic voice breathed wretchedly onto his right wrist. 

At the sensation of dampening rot stemming from the strigoi, Sebastian’s flesh darkened involuntarily, issuing acerbic, vapoury coils. They were inhaled through the initial speaker’s ghastly mouth and slitted nose without his consent. 

“Ah, they are not _pets_ , but rather a part of me, much like this malignancy you’ve respired.” 

A skin-grating humanoid shape flickered in and out of existence at the demon’s right arm, its image sharpening with every rasping, inaudible supplication. “S-stop…”

Two more revenants became visible, one having released Sebastian’s arm like he’d been burned, and the other perched overhead upon the top of the shelf. Both held long-clawed hands over their pressed lips, fangs still detectable, cutting into them. 

“Do you feel Hell’s restlessness spreading inside you?” Sebastian crooned, straightening his tie again and adjusting his cuffs. He modulated his tone into something smoothly hypnotic as he dusted the parts of himself that they had touched. “Just under the skin, crawling like an itch you cannot scratch? Of course, you will try to, when you see it creeping along, little blackened boils threatening to burst through the thin of your membrane.”

The first strigoi whined, drawing blood from his frantic scratching, slicing through exposed muscle and sinew. Sebastian could see that the others were tempted to follow, a combination of suggestion and the potency of kin blood that aromatized the room. Shamefaced, they averted their eyes. Their fingers trembled and their exposed flesh had risen with goosebumps. 

The strigoi precariously balanced atop the shelf was the first to react. He bypassed the demon, dove onto the hemorrhaging mess and his fangs pierced his brother’s throat with a crunch. It was the sickening sound of slurping, of the greedy pull on drying arteries that was the last one’s undoing, for he too pounced upon the demon’s pawn. They suckled and gorged themselves, ignoring the gurgled cries. They tore slabs of raw meat from their kin’s frame with their teeth, chewing it loudly, lustfully. They lapped the crimson fluid off the lifeless undead, off themselves, off one another, before Sebastian spoke again. 

“You do understand,” he interrupted their feeding frenzy, “that there is a fair level of contagion associated with itchiness? It nags at you until you can no longer avoid it. Seeps from the inside out, doesn’t it? It drove my young master to madness some nights,” Sebastian chuckled, remembering the writhing boy in his four-poster bed, doubled over under his sheets, cursing his frustrations. “How mosquitoes got between his toes is a magic even I cannot explain. Of course, that is a minor annoyance in comparison to your current discomfort. Have we progressed to a lice-like sensation yet?” Sebastian cocked his head, assessing their pitiful display. 

They struggled not to grip their heads, to rip the scalp from their skulls. 

They wept blood from the effort that it took. 

They blinked, their soaked sanguine blue eyes now cloaked in a purple hue.

“Please,” one of them begged and the old wooden floor creaked harshly beneath him as he squirmed. 

“You have a request?” Sebastian played coy, stepping over the drained corpse and heading towards the exit again. Whatever had dragged him into the library was now safely on his person. He had no further business here. 

“You come back and stop this,” the second demanded lamentingly, grabbing tufts of his sopping strands and violently pulling them out. His brethren looked at him with a mixed expression of longing voracity and revolted madness. 

“What will I get in exchange for that kindness?” Sebastian asked, eyeing them both, wondering idly which would first pounce and devour the other. 

“Anything,” they said in unison, sounding like the metal on metal grinding of a train stopping abruptly on its tracks.

“Our meeting here was not a coincidence. Who sent you and why?” 

“We were already here. Preparing for daytime,” one stuttered, gnawing his fingers. 

Sebastian’s mouth twisted in disappointment, eyes flashing to the fibbing strigoi. Clearly he would have felt their presence immediately upon entering if that had been the case; it was his preoccupation with the sapphire that had given them their momentary upperhand. “I do not tolerate lies,” he reproached. 

The liar’s blood bubbled under his skin in simmering blisters, the scent wafting appetizingly for his revenant counterpart. It itched and burned and liquified his bones in a soupy concoction that left him unable to stand any longer, unable to move but for opening his mouth to scream. 

The last standing strigoi lost his restraint then, cannibalizing the deformation upon the floor with the knowledge that it was only a matter of time before he devoured himself. It seemed enough of a motivation for him to come clean. 

“The manager sent us,” he said between mouthfuls, lacerating his own skin to relieve the prickling rawness overtaking him, “You’ve disobeyed House Rules, Michaelis. No killing at the Naberius.” He coughed, choking mid-glut, his belly distended by the sheer amount of flesh and blood consumed. 

It would be so convenient, Sebastian thought, to only have to question one person; to get his answers and be on his way. But as unfortunate as these run-ins were, he could not deny that it felt good to flex his power, to reprove those who underestimated or dared to challenge him. Still, the knowledge of this manager’s whereabouts would be handy, should this game of his become boring. “You work for this individual? Where can I find him?”

“No, not work,” the strigoi wiped his gash of a mouth with the back of his hand, “High Table privileges if we… if we…” He stared at his soiled, shaking hand, then pressed his lips to taste it. All these years, how had he missed the ambrosial flavour that flowed in their bodies? No doubt his own would soothe the violent itch claiming him, at the back of his throat, on the surface of his brain, between his organs, in all of the places that he could not reach. The kiss of his serrated teeth found the fleshy part of his arm and he winced, now conscious of what he was doing. “I’m not sure where he is. Maybe the penthouse? Please...”

Sebastian nodded, “As you wish. Let it be said that I am a demon of my word.” He took a knee before the whining revenant, and locating a relatively sallow spot on his chin, he titled it until their eyes met. “I agreed to put an end to this. Is it sunlight you want to avoid in seeking shelter during the day, strigoi?” 

The strigoi’s mouth fell. Sebastian could tell he wanted to say yes, to nod; instead his head tried to shake on the tips of the demon’s fingers in refusal to his accelerated fate. He could not. He was fixed there as surely as his eyes were glued to Sebastian’s, reflecting the red fissured iris amidst all that black. 

The crimson swelled in hypnotic pulses until the aperture became a sphere. It shifted colour, growing warmer in oranges and yellows and then hot as it became violet and then finally, blue. It spread, reaching the perimeter of the eye, annexing the darkness, until all that was left were starlit orbs. The devastating light that shone from them bathed not only the strigoi’s horrified face, but the whole library. Books caught fire, walls perspired and windows were blasted open thanks to the heat radiating from between shelves. The revenant’s skin began to molt and turned to ash before it hit the floor. 

The demon stood then, and shucked his gloves into a nearby blaze. Without any real purpose, new ones reappeared, _for aesthetic_ , Sebastian reasoned. He exited the library, reabsorbing the fiery damage as the doors closed behind him. 

The night was nearer to dawn now, and like the strigoi, he had no desire to linger once the sun had risen. Reaching into his pocket, he held the gemstone for his shadows to scent. They purred thunderously, stroking and nestling the blue jewel obscenely, growling over it possessively and took off westward, leading Sebastian to the end of the hall before the brass doors of a broken lift.

Ciel chastised himself internally for not having brought his gun, paranoid that they would frisk him before allowing him entry into the hotel. But the Prince didn’t know that. Carefully, his unoccupied hand dug into his deep jacket pocket, and using the Zippo he kept in there for nicotine cravings too strong to resist, he pushed the head of it against Kadar’s abdomen. “I asked you a question,” he spoke over the pizzicato strings as they died out and ended the caller’s attempt to reach him, “why do you have my phone?”

With some difficulty, owing to Ciel’s forearm against his Adam’s apple, Soma’s head inclined to see the weapon pinning him to the wall. “You’re still as trusting as ever,” he croaked. 

“Yeah? Newsflash Kadar… I don’t trust thieves, and I don’t know who you think I am, but I sure as hell don’t know you,” Ciel spat pushing the lighter harder into his patron. 

Kadar chortled a booming laugh, the masked man felt it shake the muscles in the Prince’s torso. When Ciel didn’t join in the mirth, he smirked knowingly, his shoulders relaxing as he made himself comfortable in his lean. “Is that so, Ciel Phantomhive?

Ciel was too late to conceal his sharp intake of breath. Had he had a real gun, he might have shot the man out of surprise. To make matters more baffling, though Kadar exceeded Ciel’s small stature, was more filled out and had the grace of an athlete even in stillness, he hadn’t once tried to defend himself. Ciel shook his head, and shrugged nonchalantly, “Don’t know him.”

Kadar grinned roguishly. “Really? Shoot me, then. I dare you.” 

“You don’t know what you’re asking for,” Ciel retorted, mouth going stale. Guilt washed over him, not like tender waves that lapped at a shore in low tide, but in an overwhelming tsunami, buckling his knees, carrying him away to places unknown. It was a senseless guilt, one not rooted in the soils of reality, but it was guilt all the same. 

_He cradled the limp form of Kadar in his arm. A Kadar without facial hair, tears clinging to long lashes of puffy eyes. He was bloody, injured, locks pulled back, matted with caking blood. ‘This is why I told you not to get involved with me,’ Ciel’s younger version apologized from between clenched teeth, guilt battling shame with both emotions winning._

Slowly, the Prince raised his hands and brought them to Ciel’s face. “You owe me,” he said, his accent thick in his throat as his voice trembled with excitement. His well-manicured, many-ringed fingers pushed the raven’s mask back. 

The shock of such an audacious move etched itself on Ciel’s features, eyes wide, and the wrinkling of his forehead as his brows rose, mouth falling open… Short of setting the Prince on fire with his Zippo, Ciel knew he was out of options. 

He turned away from Kadar, but could not escape him completely seeing as his patron’s face reflected in the mirror before him. He looked, _pleased_ with himself. 

“Your eye,” Kadar whispered breathless, practically bouncing on the balls of his feet, “it’s still… he’s still with you then?” 

“What? I was born with heterochromia, don’t wet yourself.” Ciel put as much distance between himself and Kadar in the lift, repositioning his mask into place. Neither man had pressed a button to ascend, and although he wanted to exit, it was Ciel’s inherent curiosity that was calling the shots. He held out his hand, “You still haven’t told me why you have my phone.”

Without a hint of mortification, the Prince boasted, “I filched it as you were talking to the doorman -- as an assurance. I needed you to come to my room, so we would not be overheard.”

“I’m not interested, thanks. It’s not that you’re not… attractive or... whatever,” Ciel stuttered, blushing scarlet and avoiding eye contact with more determination than if the Prince were Medusa. Intimacy of any sort made him grossly uncomfortable and in the short time that they’d known each other this evening, Kadar had touched Ciel more than most in the last twelve months. “I’m just not into crazy, if I’m completely honest.” 

“Flattering yourself much, Phantomhive?” Kadar seemed to consider the phone in his own pocket as the haunting ringtone started up again. He hesitated, then returned it to its owner. “You want to know about your parents, don’t you? How they died this time?” 

Ciel promptly turned off the ringer, noticing the missed call from Finny and that his battery was dangerously low. The blond was likely circling the Horseguards anxiously in the sports car. He swiped left to their text conversation before putting the phone back in his pocket, and sent him a message, one-handed, so that he wouldn’t worry, like he had dozens of times before. Outwardly, Ciel tried to keep an impassive face. It would be stupid for him to show Kadar how badly he wanted that intel, but inside, his heart pounded, his guts squirmed with excitement. Despite the comfortable temperature at which the elevator was set, Ciel felt his palms start to dampen. 

“Say that I am this... Ciel Phantomhive. How do I know I can trust you, Kadar? You did just try to lure me to your room to meet the Queen, after all...” 

The Prince hit the button denoting the seventh floor and the lift jerked to life. “First off, call me Soma, it sounds all wrong hearing your noble ass address me as royalty. Secondly, I’ll give you this in good faith,” he said twisting a ring off his thumb and offering it to the smaller man. “It belonged to your father, didn’t it?” 

Ciel’s blue eye settled on the ornate silver ring, then, as fast as he could tear his attention away, he glanced back at the Prince. The etchings and decorative rivets on the shank definitely identified it as the Phantomhive heirloom. But how had this man come by it, if he was not complicit in the crime that had claimed his parents’ lives? Ciel feigned indifference -- let this _Soma_ convince him of its authenticity. “I don’t think so. My father’s ring had --” 

“A sapphire. I know. I remember the way it looked when it was yours.” 

The elevator came to an abrupt stop on the seventh floor and the doors opened. Soma stepped out and halted when he did not hear Ciel following. “Aren’t you coming?” 

Ciel shook his head, “No.” It rankled him not to agree to the invitation, especially when Soma clearly knew _something_. But between his weariness of the Prince’s unexplained familiarity, Ciel’s suspicion on how he got his hands on the ring in the first place, and with no real weapon to defend himself, he wasn’t about to put himself at further risk. 

Nobody did anything altruistically. _Goodness_ in people was usually motivated by an attempt to appear better than one actually was, a remorseful apology for something that they’d done, or a bid to get something in return. It never took long for intent to show its face. 

Soma put his knee against the elevator door to keep it from shutting. “Fine. I get it.” With his free hand, he took Ciel’s and deposited the ring into his palm and closed his fingers around it. “It’s taken me a really long time to find you, and you’re not the only one I’m looking for. There’s this bloke,” Soma’s olive skin went pink, “his name’s Agni, might go by Arshad now, I’m not sure; but he’s important to me, and I think -- no, I _know_ he’ll have answers about your family, so it would benefit you to find him, too. I just figured you’d found Sebastian by now, with all the impressive stuff you’ve been doing… that he could help...”

“My dog? What’s he got to do with this? He passed away years ago.” 

Soma seemed to deflate like a landing montgolfier. It would have been comical if Ciel hadn’t felt a gut-churning pang of malcontent, disappointment and confusion rip through him at the mention of Sebastian’s name in such a context.

“Right... your dog,” Soma replied bitterly. “You have my number. If you… if you remember anything, if you want to talk.” With that, Soma backed away and let the doors close. 

Ciel stood, umoving, the ring a burning sensation in his hand. His fingers fanned out and he examined it more closely, alone this time. Without the stone or the prongs that kept it in place, it actually looked like a signet ring with its hexagram seal forged onto the flat uppermost surface. _Odd_. It has a dizzying effect, the longer he looked at it. Likely he was just tired, or hungry or both. Coming to the Horseguards was a bad idea. It was as the doorman had said: he was leaving with more questions than answers. All that he needed, he thought to himself as he pressed the button to go back to the ground floor, was a hot meal and a warm bath, both of which Tanaka could prepare with ease. If he was lucky, he could put this evening out of his mind until the morning where he would be adequately rested to make sense of it. 

As the elevator started its descent, Ciel took out his phone to text Finny; except that the screen remained black. “Hell.” Dead. He could always just stand outsi--

Ciel’s thought was brought short by the sudden lurching stop that caused him to lose his footing and threw him hard against the wall. His head hit with a sickening smash of broken mirror and porcelain, and the tinkling peal of them both falling. 

Grunting, and a little punch-drunk, his hands flew up to the injury. His face now exposed, he was able to feel wetness on the tips of his fingers, as well as the sizeable goose egg growing there. Overhead the lights flickered and that was when he realized the lift had ceased to move. He groped along the operating board, locating the ground floor button again through eyes streaming with reflex tears, but it did nothing. He pressed it again. And again. And again. And again. And punched it with the pinky side of his fist. “Fuck,” he cried out. 

The open door button didn’t work; he didn’t even know to which floor he’d made it or if he was in between floors. Desperate, he tried digging his fingers between the doors, as if he could pry them apart himself. 

The panic that was creeping in was like walking into the Thames one step at a time, mid-January. It was as if ice water had replaced the blood in his veins, and he could scarcely stop himself from the kind of trembling that was almost imperceptible but painful nonetheless. 

Ciel didn’t consider himself claustrophobic. He had no issues visiting slot canyons, having MRIs, or walking in catacombs, but an elevator was a cage. And he didn’t like cages. Not that he’d ever been imprisoned; he’d only suffered nightmares about them since infancy. It was an irrational fear, like snakes, his therapist had told him, he was about as likely to be struck by a viper as he was to be confined. He thought she’d been wrong though, with the amount of illegal activity in which he partook, a visit to a prison was highly conceivable.

Yet, logic seldom ever won out over dread. There was no emergency button. No alarm he could pull. His phone was useless to call anyone. 

His breaths came shallow now, and he loosened the buttons on his collar in hopes that it would help air reach his lungs that much quicker. He steadied himself against the wall, sweaty, shaky hands splayed over the mirror’s cool surface and closed his eyes. Blood oozed down the right side of his face, over his eyelid, onto his cheek and dripped off his jaw. 

He could hear his heartbeat in his ear and focused on that sound, trying his best to slow it down, but in the silence of the room, it was a siren echoing in the small space. It was erratic at first, a rhythm he couldn’t make out, but it quickly became prosaic, a recognizable funeral rite, an oppressive requiem played by his blood pumping organ. [Dies irae, Libera me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jBLyIQvNf0) thudded through his body, in his pulse and suddenly it wasn’t enough to be inside him, it exploded in the speakers built into the lift. 

“Is anyone there?” he whispered against the mirror, fogging it up. His hands clutched his ears to drown out at least eighty decibels. “Help me…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The biggest thank you ever to @teasmudge who is an incredible cheerleader & unbelievable beta. Your word alchemy knows no bounds. <3


	6. Cepheus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Am I to assume that you do not know the young master’s whereabouts, Baldroy?” Sebastian asked, his tailcoat knitting itself up anew.
> 
> “Yessir,” Bard said with a hint of his soldier persona. “Neither does Mey-Rin. And we can’t find Finnian, Tanaka or Snake, either.”
> 
> Sebastian turned away from the still screeching skinwalker and made for the westerly exit, hoping the next stairwell would be there. “Ah, I see. Might there be a division among the servants' ranks?” He sighed, feeling Bard’s doubts from across the length of the room, “because that would be most unfortunate.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>    
> 
> 
> Title: Cepheus  
> By: [T-stray](https://t-stray.tumblr.com)  
> Paintool Sai and ClipStudioPaint  
> Character (c) Yana Toboso  
> 
> 
>   
> Music inspiration: [Enjoy the Silence (cover) by Breaking Benjamin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-quw1RGKQ_U)

Somewhere across the universe, a soul cried in broken affirmation, reviving its phantom covenant. 

The connection was instantaneous. It was not an invitation, as it left no room for refusal. It carried the demon forward, warping his surroundings with the intensity of its summons. In that moment, nothing else mattered; not the brass doors that had turned to soot upon his passage through them, neither the small legion of entities that were rushing to his location to try their hand at glory… there was only the call, and the past it belonged to. 

_The devil sauntered from the ruins of Baron Kelvins’ burning manor, carrying the traumatized lord in both hands. The smell of charred flesh was a burden to the air, as were the imminent footsteps of the tightrope walker. It was during times like these, when the earl divulged his weaknesses; whimpering and lamenting over the pasts of his grief like a poor, pathetic lamb, that Sebastian had to exercise great restraint to not devour his master whole. He was loathe to admit that his revenge against Solomon might have become more onerous than amusing._

_And as demons know no sympathy, his attempts to comfort the boy, yet again, were not out of fondness. It was to soothe his own ego, to give the earl another chance to prove his worth, to lend him his strength, to remind him that, at times, fiends come in both human and demonic forms._

_“Entangled,” he crooned against the boy’s temple, “that is what we are, young master. By our contract, we are connected through infinite time and space. You can no longer breathe without it affecting me. And I... I can hunger for no other without your notice. From now on, when the cosmos ponder our existence, one shall not be considered without the other.”_

Sebastian shuddered, the recollection sliding away, tucked into the safe of his long memory. Against all odds, his young master had reawakened, just as he had. And he was _somewhere_ , contained within the lift. The issue, of course, was _which_ lift, for Sebastian could only feel the earl in the same way that paralleled mirrors reflected one another: infinitely. He knew, as a trespasser of The Naberius that he’d left one dimension only to step into another, and that he was facing Schrodinger’s paradox in trying to tease out which of them contained a Ciel Phantomhive that was still very much alive, still deliciously contracted to him. 

His hands drifted along the mirror like a divining rod in search of heat instead of water. Some areas reminded him of _home_ , felt cold, and void-like, while others produced discordant melodies upon his touch. But there was one spot, next to lift controls that met his intuitive criteria, even possessed an unnatural lustre that coincidentally resembled the outline of a pair of blurred hands. 

He stilled his movements. Absorbed the warmth from beyond the wall. It wouldn’t be that easy. When had it ever been? The earl’s voice mocked him just thinking about it: _‘Get me my revenge, Sebastian, but I’ll do all of the work at my slow, human pace’, ‘Find those who did this to my family, Sebastian, but let me do the killing, (even though my cottoned fingers cannot pull the trigger without a whimper)’, ‘I’m done, Sebastian. I’ll play this fretful game no more, just go ahead and get it ove--’_

The words blazed in his mind, but it was his hands that pulled away, as if he’d been burned. A feral snarl ripped through his throat, disturbing The Naberius’ chimeric shimmer . This was an untruth; the earl would never… _had_ never... abandoned their covenant. Clearly, the mirror was bewitched. He positioned his hands back upon the stained luminosity nonetheless, and in a tone that dripped eternal torment and hellfire, he beseeched his contractor to make himself known.

Help always came to Ciel in the most unattractive ways: effective hallucinatory medication, but with a list of side effects longer than his arm, a tow truck that breaks down after he's been stranded for six hours...

But this? This was even worse than the beard he’d hired to get Snake off his back, after he’d mentioned how lonely he seemed. How was he supposed to know that escorts fell for their employers? 

Just… that noise a moment ago… So guttural, vicious, and famished -- it couldn’t be human! True, it had soothed the requiem to silence and made the lights stop flickering, but now he stood in the dark, mute to everything but the echoing growl from somewhere beyond. He couldn’t even hear his own heartbeat, just the shake of his breaths, and the spasm of nonsensical words. 

It demanded its _young master_ , which was not him --thank goodness! Who would answer such a call? Who would willingly beckon death to their side? 

_A genuflected figure in a tailcoat, amber eyes slit like a cat, devoured him from beneath feather dusted lashes. His own childlike hand, clad in heavy regalia was extended aristocratically and held tight in the sycophant’s grasp. “Nn, you would like that, wouldn’t you, demon? For me to settle with my title and my ‘happiness’?”_

_The scent of lilies in ornate vases lining the floor to ceiling windows wafted between them, and were he not at the heart of Buckingham Palace after having had an audience with the Queen, he might have thought he was at a funeral parlour instead._

_“You were never summoned as a harbinger of happiness, but rather one of war. I command you to become my sword and my shield, Sebastian!”_

_A merciless smile split the otherwise handsome face of the kneeling servant. His presence billowed out dauntingly from brazen overconfidence, and Ciel felt it fill every crevice and every nook in the Grand Hallway. He did not succumb to the less than subtle intimidation, and the patch he wore over his right eye did not hamper the impartial haughtiness of his glare._

_The figure broke the quiet with a rumble of thunder, speaking the words for which Ciel had been waiting: those that reaffirmed their pact. “Undoubtedly, I shall. The crown of triumph is as good as yours, young master.”_

Ciel’s eyes went wide and his hands slid down the mirror, leaving streaks of blood in their wake. _He wasn’t dissociating; his therapist had reassured him that he didn’t fit any dissociative criteria_.

Then what kind of fuckery was this? 

An excruciating tightness possessed him. He was going crazy, that’s all there was to it. No special name or diagnosis. Just **crazy**. _See, Tanaka? Doubling up on that medication wouldn’t have made a difference!_ He was going to implode, here at The Horseguards. Years of plotting and manipulating, of strategizing and building an anonymous online empire to find out the truth about his parents' demise, only to be lured under false pretenses. The cheat had been cheated. And for what? Nothing. 

Nothing but impending heart failure, and some rubbishy hallucinations. _Damn it to Hell._

“Damn you to Hell Sss--” he hissed, this time out loud, yet incomplete. It was on the tip of his tongue. A word, a malediction to cast his blame, to soothe his agitation. From his tongue, it confided to his lips, like it had been there the whole time, ready to keep the singular shred of his control from ripping itself apart. 

“Sebastian,” Ciel gasped through barely-parted lips, shaking his head in disbelief, “Sebastian… no…”

It was him. Voice bolder, older, more resolute; but still unmistakably _him_.

Sebastian combed every surface with more fervour, filling the lift with stifling darkness, commanding one pet to melt into the floor, while the other scoured the ceiling. Simultaneous growls from demon and xenomorphs echoed in the small compartment, shattering the glass. Liquid sand spilled onto Sebastian’s shiny oxfords only to reveal another wall of unblemished mirror. Famished, the demon’s claws tore through his own specular reflection, over, and over, and over. Each time he caught sight of himself, his iteration became angrier, and his eyes, inhuman gaps of depthless fire. 

The barrier could not be breached. 

His forehead rested against the pane of glass as his brain finally caught up with his ire. He ransacked every iota of knowledge he possessed for a solution. His master was **there** , just on the other side. He snarled a suppressed roar that heated the mirror, turning it to liquid once more. Stewing over his dilemma, he drummed his claws irritably, and it beat hard against the glass like the pulse of a waltz: _one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three._

How had he not seen it from the outset? If some primordial entity was powerful enough to barre his passage, then they were not beneath bending his reality into thinking the young lord might be within his grasp. 

His renewed rage unleashed a visceral, frenzied energy that made even his xenomorphs retreat for cover within the mercy of his shadow. It grew impossibly hot, surprising even the devil that his surroundings did not simply melt away. But it confirmed his suspicion; he had been led here, on purpose. And they had been prepared. _Who_ dared wake a starved, hibernating beast to dangle its food just out of its reach? To outright mock its inability to fulfill its duty? One trespass was deserving of death. Two justified dimensional collapse. 

The dense air was feral with fury, as he tried once more to tear the impossible barrier with teeth and claws, darkness and light. The untold remnants of souls that resided within him caterwauled their suffering at his present indignation; they could not hold his attention. Not like the faint denials and _no, no, no_ he could just make out through the mirror, or the accompanying breaths degenerating to gasping, gulping, wheezing, choking. 

The earl was having an attack, and based on the increasing sharpness of each inspiration, nobody was there to help him. To Hell with his curiosity and his revenge. He had but one task at the moment. 

_‘It wasn’t good at this distance,’ Sebastian recalled thinking as he assessed his master’s proximity to Undertaker and the revenant at the Midnight Tea Party. He would have to disobey the earl’s command and allow the Reaper to evade them once again._

_How it galled him to play into Undertaker’s expectations. More so to be lectured by his contractor for doing so!_

_“Hey, Sebastian!” Ciel fumed, further incensed by Undertakers’ parting mirth._

_With one hand, the butler roughly pushed his charge behind him, annoyed by the turn of events. His other plowed through the skull of a bizarre doll, careful not to cover Ciel in the resulting gore. It was a matter of getting him to safety now; the immediate case had been solved on behalf of the Queen, but as a whole, Weston had been a colossal waste of time._

_“Sebastian! I ordered you —”_

_“I am aware of that,” Sebastian snapped, “but our contract dictates that you are to be made the priority, my lord.” He dispatched the remaining abominations and heard Ciel open his mouth to argue. “Save your breath, young master. I have not gone to great lengths and suffered many an inconvenience to cultivate you, only for someone else to reap the rewards.”_

He had been correct in defying him then, and he was damned if he’d let The Naberius keep him from what was his now. He turned away from Ciel’s pulsating heat, determined to leave the hotel in search of him.

The elevator shook again, and Ciel heard the final shards of glass shatter and plummet to the littered ground. The siren had belatedly started blaring, and with it, the overhead sprinkler and an oscillating red caution light. His white knuckled hands were clutching the brass handrail – quite the feat of strength considering that unclamping them from his mouth left him vulnerable enough to call out for his long dead… dog?

 _‘It’s an earthquake,_ he rationalized, _just an earthquake._ It was likely what had caused the lift the stall. His body had been rendered so sensitive to every movement it made that he felt his eyes jerk back and forth under his lids like a pendulum on speed while he scanned though his memory. They had earthquakes in London, right? Finny had mentioned having felt one at some point, hadn’t he? 

There was nothing for it, he was fucked. There was no cover to be taken, and just when he thought it could get no worse, the brass under his fingers burned without provocation, wet as it was. Steam swelled and rippled from the cheap metal in persevering black plumes. Behind them, his imagination, assisted by his proclivity to hallucinate, projected something exquisitely monstrous, something many-eyed and alien upon the wall. 

Some million years of evolution made Ciel retreat from it until his heels hit the elevator doors; but something stronger than even that made him want to turn his back against humanity and fall into its devilish embrace. 

And so he fell.

Fell back through the doors that were wrenched apart and held open by the grace of Finny’s trembling hands. 

“Hurry, Ciel. I can’t h-hold it much longer,” his friend panted as a vein prominently snaked its way along his temple and bulged with the effort he was exerting. 

Foot hooking the handle of his bag, Ciel crawled out between Finny’s legs into the hallway. Behind him, the doors snapped shut and echoed down the hall. A silver head, decorated in tight curlers poked out and muttered something about people trying to sleep. 

Finny pulled Ciel up to his feet and hitched the bag over his own shoulder. “We gotta get you out of here, and quick. We’ll get Sieglinde to patch you up.” When Ciel swayed on the spot, he nudged him gently, as if a weak breeze could knock him over. “Why didn’t you answer your phone?” 

“Dead,” Ciel said, his voice onomatopoeic. His hair was drenched, his mouth would not close of its own volition and his wandering gaze could not settle on one place: the imprints of Finny’s fingers on the outside of the elevator doors, the unquaking hallway, the relative calm that served as a jagged contrast to the lift…

“Hey, Fin,” he began, schlepping forward, eyes trying to focus despite the fact that letters on the exit sign at the end of the hall were dancing. “Do we know a Sebastian? Because I swear I--”

“No.” 

Finny’s brusque tone took Ciel by surprise. “Are you --”

“I’m sure we don’t. Only your dog.” Finny slowed, and threw Ciel’s arm over his shoulder to speed up their process. “How hard did you hit your head?” 

“Hard. I mean… shite, I left my mask in there,” he pointed back. “It broke when my face hit the mirror.” 

Finny cursed under his breath. How odd it was to see him this way, his jaw set, his voice steady and articulate. There was no sign of the friendliness he usually possessed. “I _knew_ this was a bad idea. I’ll come back for it as soon as you’re safe.”

“Safe from what?” Ciel demanded as he was lowered to the floor. He followed Finny after the blond pushed the door open with his shoulder and started descending the stairwell. They didn’t seem far up, two floors at most. Still, every time they went down a step, his hamstrings burned. 

“What’s going on?” he demanded. His temper, always quick to rise, but mostly easy to hide, gave him away this time. “Tell me, Fin! I’m seeing shit, more than usual… eyes and teeth. Me, but not me. And this... this black butler. I hear him…” 

Finny took out his phone and texted someone without looking. “Shh… nothing. Don’t be so loud, they’ll hear you. Just keep up...” he urged. 

“You’re lying.” Ciel halted, having only gone passed the second floor door. Resentment paralyzed his face. “You’re lying. _Soma_ mentioned a Sebastian. Asked me if I found him. Do you know Soma, Finny? If you won’t tell me, I won’t go further.” Ciel plopped himself on the step, crossing his arms petulantly, glaring up at his friend. 

But not for long. 

The blond scooped him up as if he weighed nothing and hefted him over his shoulder. “Your parents died here. Do you want to die here too?”

Sebastian deserted the lift and was met by a reception of corpses strewing the hallway. It resembled an excavation site at Pompeii with hundreds of bodies encased in layers of hardened pumice and darkest ash. The xenomorphs materialized before him, cutting through the expired supernatural beings in order to clear a path for their host.

“Like moths to a flame, the lot of you,” the demon simpered in the wake of his destruction. “But there is some heat that not even the ignorance of greed can withstand.” 

Now that he had put distance between himself and the lift, he could no longer feel his young master. No matter; the situation would be shortly rectified upon leaving The Naberius. Perhaps, the earl's impressive pedigree had secured him and his family residence in the Horseguards? He had mentioned at one point in their contract, that his late father had been gifted a suite by Her Majesty due to its proximity to the Parliament. 

In the time that it took for the remains of his foes to lose their cindered shapes, he passed the previously visited Obizuth library, and reached the staircase. He did a double-take, from one end of the hall to the other. There wasn’t any way he had confused the direction from which he had come. And yet, the marbled stairway he had ascended, no longer had stairs leading to the first few floors. The larger of the two xenomorphs scythed the ground, and when that wasn’t sufficient, dusky, corrosive ooze dripped from its maw in a puddle that was as inefficient as its keen-edged claws. 

“How inconvenient,” he breathed, aware that the walls had likely eyes and likelier ears. Ten minutes ago, such a turn of events would have been inconsequential; he had been looking for those who might have the answers he sought: What had become of the earl? Who had snatched him away? 

But in the face of fleeting temptation and rousing hunger that he’d experienced in the lift, his plan had changed, for whom better to justify this confusing outcome than the young master, himself? 

To have those plans altered once more was bothersome, and if he was frank, shameful. It spoke poorly to his butler’s aesthetic. What would the little lord have to say about the delay of his arrival, especially after calling out so furtively for his demon? ‘Twas better to hush the boy up expeditiously, and devour him, as had been his intent since having first laid eyes on the diminutive thing. 

His patience stretched to its limit, he forwent the stairs and scaled the slight current blowing upwards. With each floor he ascended, the upper and lower ones closed themselves off to him so that he was forced to traverse them one at a time and encounter whichever entity dared stand between him and the exit at the opposite end. He considered the lift once more, but it too had barred him from entry. 

The fourth floor had been uneventful; less than a handful of reapers, each leaving behind one of the earl’s cinematic strips before perishing. They were trivial at best. The first of the boy pouring over a yellowed map of Germany, butchering the pronunciation of the cities inscribed there. Another of him sat upon his bed as he, the butler, tried in vain to button his spats, only to have the earl gripe about the ill fit of the shoe. It was accompanied by a three-second grin of triumph as he announced that the boy’s feet had grown. A third was more blurry, the shape of a paper at hand indistinct, as if his young master were drowsy in his recollection of the details. All he registered was a solemn red room decorated in the demon’s taste, a crackling fire, and his own enticing voice reciting Latin prose that was not proper for adolescence or the ilk of a Phantomhive. 

He abandoned the first two and pocketed the third for nostalgia’s sake. 

The fifth floor was spectacularly dull; an assortment of simpletons, lined up, weapons and skills at the ready. They were like the cheap Valentine’s Day chocolates produced by Funtom’s competitors, each weaker and more pathetic than the one preceding it. A couple of strigoi, a dozen changelings, just as many gjengangers, and even more red caps. He supposed the banshee was amusing. In a swift swipe of fang, he’d torn her vocal cords from her throat, then ordered her to go, and announce his presence to those huddled in the penthouse. He met her disbelieving glare with a threat of death, told her he would gladly finish her off properly if she did not leave immediately. 

She complied, hands at the base of her neck to keep her head steady and took off into the lift. Apparently the higher ups manipulating the barrier were only prejudiced against him. 

The sixth floor was marked by the ostentatiously extravagant: basilisks, chimera, minotaurs and wraiths, among others. They were all so lovely; a shame they got in his way, really. 

The seventh floor was devoid of rooms altogether, though not of life. A kitchen, the largest he’d seen in all of London (including Buckingham Palace), was a bustling hub of chaotic energy. No one took notice of his presence, and how could they in the thick of all that noise? Inhuman concoctions bubbled in their copper pots, flowing over and dotting the untidy linoleum. Plasma simmered in pans, seering the flesh it marinated. Cooking implements such as skewers and surgical saws were removed from their ceramic jars for sharpening and put to use. In the far corner, he could hear the steam of a brazen bull whistle and whatever was inside screech. A revolving spice rack containing nightshade, whitesnake and hemlock spun continually for ease of selection. 

It was clear that this kitchen catered to the guests of The Naberius, to the most grisly of appetites; as such they did not suit his own. There was not an ounce of refinement here, not an atom of singular beauty that could please his palate, much less satisfy his ravenous proclivities… not anymore, not since… _him_. 

He walked through the cookery, inspecting it as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do. He took note of a sodden tea bag left out on a wasted spoon -- _unacceptable_ , dusty ledges of condescending windows -- _unsightly_ , fruit flies buzzing above a bowl of overripe food -- _unsavoury_ , a stack of unattended dirty dishes piled high in the sink -- _one would think this kitchen would have been run by a most abhorrent chef._

At that very moment, he smelt it: a soupy mixture of tobacco, gunpowder and something distinctively…

“Baldroy. This is the twenty-first century. From what I’ve seen of this establishment, they have adequate facilities for you to get rid of your infernal stench.”

The room went quiet, minus the fastidious chewing of kibble by a fetching black and white tabby, off to the side. 

“Hey, look who’s finally decided to get up. How was your nap, boss?” 

The blond chef wore his signature apron, which might have been the cleanest surface in the whole kitchen apart from that adorable patch of snowy fur that circled the demon’s feet. He crouched, taking it into his hands and up to his chest. Sebastian’s gloves receded back into his flesh so that he could feel the soft texture of her coat. 

“Outta here, take five,” Bard called gruffly to his kitchen staff, none of which bore the same human guise that he did. Instead of putting the butt of his current cigarette out on the countertop, he merely absorbed it into his mouth, wrapping his tongue around it, fully lit. “Ya know, no matter how many times I try to quit,” he chewed, “this ole vessel just keeps wanting more. It’s like fucking and setting shit on fire. These humans know how to do _some_ stuff okay.” 

Sebastian sighed in mild irritation, but kept calm if only for the kitten’s sake. It bumped its head into his lapels and blinked its eyes as it slowly gazed up at him. If he wasn’t mistaken, the beguiling little miss was trying her hand at seduction. Coincidentally, she was succeeding; after the scent of the young master, she was easily the most desirable thing with which he’d come into contact. 

“You are aware that demons can and do fornicate and burn things as well, aren’t you, Baldroy?”

Bard swallowed the butt, and promptly lit a new cigarette. “Yeah, s’pose you’re right, Mister Sebastian; it just feels less controlled when I do it in this body. It’s funner.” 

“ _Funner_ isn’t a word,” the demon exasperated, stroking the kitten between its ears. Its purring made her vibrate adorably, summoning his tendrils to feed off the sweet surrounding frequencies. 

“Words don’t matter much anymore, tbh.”

Sebastian cocked an eyebrow, and the kitten smacked his face gently for his attention. “Tbh?”

“ _To be honest,_ ” the chef smirked, looking smug about having finally one-upped the butler. “Welcome to two-thousand-nineteen, where people are lazy, words are hard, and we talk in abbreviations. Wtf right?”

“Indeed,” Sebastian answered, uncaring of what the blond was going on about. Some things just never changed. “Well, Baldroy, as you can imagine, I’m in somewhat of a hurry.” 

Nothing was out of the ordinary here; Baldroy still seemed to be playing the role of a useless chef. All the same, Sebastian was suspicious at the lack of foes. Surely The Naberius had not run out of patrons or arsenal yet. Perhaps they’d finally come to their senses and would allow him to saunter out the way he came, with this exquisite feline, of course; she did not seem opposed to the idea. Her left paw came up to brush his cheek affectionately, and then her right to his jaw, holding his face, holding his attention. He smiled down at her intelligent eyes, and felt them boring into his. 

The vitreous liquid behind the lens of his eyes were expanding, his corneas, bulging. The pressure was tolerantly uncomfortable and was relieved only somewhat by the tears that began to flow freely down his cheeks.

With a tongue like sandpaper, the tabby licked the demon’s tears, shivering as it shimmered, its weight against his chest vacillating almost imperceptibly. The mucilaginous saliva caused a stirring in the demon’s cells; he sensed them resisting a recombination of genes and a sluggishness in his usually quick metabolism. He chuckled. “Oh, my darling, you really thought you were strong enough, didn't you?” 

The cat gave a hiss in his arms and lashed out; what had previously been needlepoint claws were now a skinwalker’s jagged nails and they were coming ruthlessly for his face. He caught the wrist in mid-air, just in time, and dangled the naked little witch at arm’s length. 

She struggled, kicking, spitting and seething, her face contorted in fury and concentration as she tried to absorb the collapsar’s appearance. “Lemme go!” 

Her voice still held some feline to it, which disheartened Sebastian. This would have been easier if she’d sounded more human. “How does something so putrid take the form of such a lovely creature?” he asked rhetorically. “It pains me to not abide by your request, but I cannot have you blemishing my beauty before I have the chance to meet my young master again. What would he say if he saw me in such a state?” 

He took the skinwalker to the Brazen Bull. As its occupant was no longer vocal, there would be sufficient room for the double-crosser. 

“You! Chef! Stop this immediately! If you don’t, yy-you’re complicit in his actions! The manager…” She called over Sebastian’s shoulder, growling and scuffling like a cat about to be brought to the bath.

“No can do.” Bard walked over, grabbing the flame thrower off the top shelf and pulling the goggles atop his head to shield his eyes. He sat on his haunches next to the Brazen Bull to check the kindling stored beneath it. “That there’s my boss. I’m not dumb enough to cross him.” 

“And yet you lack the intelligence to inform me of what I was holding,” he grumbled, using his free hand to unfasten the small door’s latch. Once open, the escaping steam fogged up all the windows, and the scent was one of brackish roast. He swung the arm hoisting the skinwalker towards the heat and her flailing redoubled. 

“Now, my dear, some answers please, and I might show you some leniency. Why don’t you start by telling me why you assaulted me so?”

“You’ll let me go?” The skinwalker pleaded, her eyes becoming large and round like saucers. 

“Tut, tut, that’s not what I said,” Sebastian corrected, “but as I told Baldroy, I am short on time, so if you have nothing…”

On cue, Bard ignited the flame thrower and lit the kindling so that a bond fire roared under the Brazen Bull’s belly. 

“You broke the rules, demon. Anyone who kills you gets a reward!” The witch sputtered. “Can’t let you get to the King.” 

“Which King?” Sebastian asked, pushing the witch’s backside so that it was closer to the fire. 

She squealed, and brought her legs up to wrap around the demon’s arm. “The King! The King! The head of the High Table! Please!” She wailed, “Please! He’s been gone for centuries and he’s coming of age soon to take the crown. They don’t want him back. They don’t want any of them back! But they don’t want you to get him either! Pl-pleee-ease! I d-don’t know his name,” she bawled, and her body began to shrink considerably, while patches of fur sprouted hither and thither. “Please. Only the reapers know his name! That’s all I know, I swear! I swear!” 

Bard and Sebastian exchanged a knowing look and a furtive nod. The chef extracted the skinwalker from the demon’s arm; his tailcoat had suffered quite a bit of damage, not to mention the excessive shedding. 

“Am I to assume that you do not know the young master’s whereabouts, Baldroy?” Sebastian asked, his tailcoat knitting itself up anew.

“Yessir,” Bard said with a hint of his soldier persona. “Neither does Mey-Rin. And we can’t find Finnian, Tanaka or Snake, either.” 

Sebastian turned away from the still screeching skinwalker and made for the westerly exit, hoping the next stairwell would be there. “Ah, I see. Might there be a division among the servants' ranks?” He sighed, feeling Bard’s doubts from across the length of the room, “because that would be most unfortunate.” 

“Uh huh,” Bard agreed, and not wanting to linger on the subject to invite Sebastian’s wrath, asked: “You want me to get rid of this?” 

“I said I would be lenient, and I shall,” Sebastian said, disappearing from the kitchen, his voice carrying his order to the chef on a shadowed coil. “Dispose of her quickly. There is no need for fire and superfluous suffering.” 

Half way up to the eighth floor he heard Bard mutter something about _never being able to have any fun _, followed swiftly by an efficient _crack, crack, pop, snap_. He might have shuddered if the skinwalker’s insights hadn’t already rattled him. __

___A King?_ _ _

__How did they know? After all the permutations of names and titles through millennia? By British standards, Earl Ciel Phantomhive was not royalty, no matter how much he had insisted on being treated as such. He had no affiliation to the Crown other than to do its bidding, and ruthlessly. But true, dynastic sovereignty had its own flavour, a celestial essence that held the Divine Right of Kings. It was this that fed Sebastian’s revenge and with it, the allegiance of the demons he had freed from Solomon’s oppression._ _

__He pushed through the door to the eighth floor, expecting anything at this point. The individual orchestrating this elaborate feint knew him; knew him well enough to get under his skin with that damnable witch. What was next? Young master doppelgängers?_ _

__He was wrong in more ways than one. Luckily, an infantry of earls was not waiting for him as he’d feared. In fact, the floor was rather barren in comparison to the other floors. Nothing but a lone figure stood at the end of the hall._ _

__Sebastian’s lip curled, bearing gleaming fangs. His weight was redistributed onto his back foot, lowering ever so slightly into a crouch. His eyes scorched with a burn of hatred so intense that it cast a crimson haze upon everything it touched. Behind him, his tail coat billowed, ends snapping like livewires and the screech of his pets carried down the hall, lifting and splintering the floorboards, tearing through the antiquated Persian rug-runners._ _

__From his distance, the demon made out every discolouration, every remnant of the sutures that had disfigured the face, neck and pinky finger of the man barring his way to the next set of stairs. True, he was better dressed now, in refined bespoke apparel, designer glasses, and his hair pulled neatly back, all but for a braid, tucked carelessly behind his ear._ _

__“Forget about him, butler,” Undertaker advised, looking his nose down at the devil opposite him without a trace of fear. “Do us all a favour, and find yourself a new contractor.”_ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @teasmudge is an absolute icon of a beta and an inspirational writer. If you haven't read her fics yet, please visit them [here](https://archiveofourown.org/users/teasmudge/pseuds/teasmudge) and give her some love!
> 
> Massive thanks to @gocaitycat for putting up with my crap and reading sorting through my filth words. Beta-extraordinaire!
> 
> Big hugs to @scarlet-la-rose for all her help with formatting and the idea of black hole spacers! She's such a kind soul, and we don't deserve her. <3


	7. Phoenicis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Young master, allow me reunite you with your butler. I won’t even kill Finny if you come quick,” Mey-Rin proposed in what she deemed a fair trade. The boy always had a weak spot for the gardener. A little friend he was, or perhaps something closer to a brother...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>    
> 
> 
> Title: Phoenicis  
> By: [T-stray](https://t-stray.tumblr.com)  
> Paintool Sai and ClipStudioPaint  
> Character (c) Yana Toboso  
> 
> 
>   
> Music inspiration: [You're Somebody Else by Flora Cash](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVdPh2cBTN0)

Collapsars are ancient monsters, many of which emerged during the dawn of the Universe’s Dark Age. As such, their longevity can only be matched by their indomitable memory which houses a notorious list populated by deities and mortals alike. If Solomon occupied the top most spot on Sebastian’s hit list, Undertaker took second place, just beneath him. 

The Campania had been an unmitigated disaster, and that silver-haired bastard had been responsible for it all. Having to endure Francis and her incessant nitpicking was bothersome, her damnable daughter’s constant screeching of her betrothed’s name -- mildly irritating; Sebastian could even tolerate having been dragged onto a vessel crossing the Atlantic, one that contained more caterwauling undead than rats… 

But witnessing his young master being unceremoniously flung into the bowels of a broken first-class lounge like one of the former reaper’s disposable dolls had Undertaker jockeying for first place in the butler’s opinion. 

Each millimeter in which he watched the earl slip from his grasp was a lifetime, each thud of the boy’s heart, an eternity. 

The pernicious penetration of the Death Scythe through his own demonic body paled in comparison to the fear of losing the earl’s soul. 

Of losing _everything_. 

As if that kind of anguish was not bad enough, he had to relive the minutiae of their mutual obligation! All those nights, stalk still by the sniveling little lord’s bedside, the trite requests for sweets and the consequential bellyaching, the learned helplessness in all things mundane: getting dressed and bathing, for instance. 

But there were other, more gratifying things: the subtle maturation of his elegantly keen mind, the ripening of his vengeance, the ambrosial array of his conflicted desolation. And as the former grew, so did his own enjoyment of his role as _butler_. Their Game had become most compelling; he was damned if anyone but himself would be allowed to put an end to it. 

Demons were not made to suffer loss any more than their pride was meant to be swallowed. In the off-chance that their intended prey escaped, the matter could not be rectified by napping or giving oneself a conciliatory pep talk. 

When a demon's ego bled, the world at large felt it. Pangs of humiliation overtook those of hunger. It left them empty, depleted, tore a void so catastrophic in the Universe that the resulting absence of light gave birth to their legacies: Collapsars, Black Hole Monstrosities, Horrors of Eldritch. 

“You think I would surrender my meal voluntarily to _you_ , Undertaker?” Sebastian spat, poised to attack the unflinching reaper. The two entities at the demon’s sides exchanged heated looks and began to advance in measured steps, their snarls mimicking the sound of thin ice splitting underfoot. 

Undertaker’s raucous laughter stretched his face unattractively. From behind his back, where his hands were hidden, he procured two things at once. The first gleamed silver, absorbing what little light was left in the room within its long, curved blade. It haloed around the metal and cast a long shadow upon the floor, accompanied by another, much shorter one at its side. The owner of the second shadow emerged from behind the reaper as an adolescent boy, quite small for his age. He side-stepped Undertaker, taking his place to the man’s right, clasping his tiny hand into the larger one. The pint-sized aristocrat bore an expression of deepest disdain, or was it disinterest? Regardless, it was so similar to the earl’s that upon seeing it, a nostalgic ache tugged both at the periphery of the demon’s memory and his abysmal void. 

Sebastian froze, except for his fist that closed around the immaterial restraints that held his pets back. They dissolved into the floor to rejoin the shadows.

“Wise of you, butler.” With his free hand, Undertaker pushed his glasses up his nose and gazed down paternally at the boy whose fingers he held. “You’ve gone through _my_ Hotel, leaving a trail of corpses and carnage in your wake, and for what?” 

“For _him_ …” Sebastian growled. “He belongs to me. You and your guests have made it exceedingly difficult to reacquire that which is rightfully mine.” The demon trembled, shaking the very foundations of the Naberius with his anger. 

The movement caused the boy to cling to the reaper, and Sebastian could see his fingers at his side move in turn to tap his thumb: index to thumb, middle finger to thumb, ring finger to thumb, pinky to thumb. Over and Over. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. It was a nervous habit the young lord had picked up somewhere along his childhood, and as he aged, he better concealed it by shoving his whole hand into his pockets. 

This was him, the noble he had been at fourteen; but the longer he stood there, the less he was the devil’s earl. His _Ciel_ would never have sought protection from Undertaker. And this copy’s essence was all wrong; he was a fraction as stellar, with death lurking behind his eyes. 

“Still? You _still_ think he belongs to you? Are you quite sure, demon?” He wrapped an arm around the boy who struggled to stand on his own. “You forfeited your contract, don’t you remember?”

At those words, Ciel whimpered, and the sound of deceit sickened Sebastian. This was not his young master, for the earl’s stoicism would not have permitted such a show of weakness. Also, if he had truly abandoned his covenant, he would not be here to grieve its loss. He’d have first bent the celestial heavens to his will before letting anything stand in the way of the earl’s revenge. 

Sebastian rose from his crouch, seemingly relaxed. The tightness around Undertaker’s phosphorescent eyes even slackened at this show of civility. 

The slight reprieve was too good to be true for the boy, too short-lived, as a sharp spaded tail surged from the posterior shadow gathered along the tall frames lining the walls, and pierced his delicate chest. 

The mouth of the reaper’s substitute opened in a silent scream, his lifeless eyes shocked and pleading, blood spilling from the jagged gash and pooling into the palms of his ringless fingers. As the pet withdrew its violence from the slumping body, it caught hold of a mangled cinematic record and brought it to its master for examination.

The demon did not spare a hint of worry for the fraudulent little thing collapsing onto the floor, he merely clutched the authentic memory that had been tucked inside him. 

“Undertaker, if you believe for a moment that I will not act in kind upon finding my young master, then I daresay you underestimate my hunger.” 

The reaper put distance between himself and the disintegrating carcass next to him, and snorted reproachfully. “I assumed as much. Here’s the thing, Sebastian; are you still going by Sebastian? The _demon_ title is so tired, you know? But I digress…” He disappeared his scythe with a flourish of his hand. “Here’s the thing, Sebastian, while you’ve been sleeping, the world has not paused to mourn your temporary loss. Humans have made much progress, especially when it comes to understanding themselves. You see, parts have names now; the soul in the form of memories for instance, is no longer seated in the heart or in the hypothalamus as we first thought, but actually in these tiny little specialized cells we call ‘ _neurons_ ’.”

Sebastian sighed, exasperated. He’d been made to listen to the reaper’s ramblings one too many times. He advanced on Undertaker, determined to go through him if he could not go around him. 

“Ah… I’m sorry, but you’ll definitely need to listen to this, to appreciate the situation.” As if having ears to hear Undertaker’s bidding, the atmosphere in the hotel shifted, creating a similar barrier between demon and reaper as it had between the collapsar and the exits to the lower floors. 

Much to his dismay, and the rage that bubbled just under his butlerish facade, Sebastian was stalled from going any further. 

“As I was saying,’ Undertaker cleared his throat, and leaned back against the wall comfortably, “neurons. The human brain has over a billion neurons, and each one has over a thousand connections to other neurons. Scientists believe that each connection possesses the capacity to store a memory.” His voice became more animated, eyes growing rounder with excitement as he pressed on. “If you do the math, _Sebastian_ , that means over the course of **a** lifetime, a single human might have the same number of memories as there are stars in the sky.” 

The demon blinked, unimpressed. As far as he was concerned, the soul was a single entity, much like a meal taken as a whole. Yes, delicacies required a variety of ingredients, herbs and spices; he had become acquainted with this concept in the service of Phantomhive. But in the end, when one savoured the feast, it was not the deconstructed elements one recalled most fondly. 

“I fail to see why that matters, Undertak--”

“I thought you might,” Undertaker interrupted. “You demons are all _big picture_ , only concern yourselves with appearances. But consider this: if I choose to keep your contractor hidden, I’ll hardly run out of memories to scatter around as red herrings, won’t I? Imagine an eternity of chasing down false earls, Collapsar. What will win out in the end, your tenacity or your hunger??”

A black fog-like substance filled the tight space occupied by the demon, and even darker halations blurred the barrier. Like light, it spread beyond its proper boundaries inching its way towards its adversary. He was not conscious of doing so, incensed as he was. 

At present, he existed only as an infinite mind trapped in the prison of its unlimited thoughts, and he wondered idly if his young master felt quite the contrary. Could mortals be aware of memories if they were no longer with them, or did they experience them as amnesic voids? 

_Would the earl remember him at all?_

More to the point, how had Undertaker extracted his contractor’s memories? Was his young master a hostage of the reaper’s now or had Undertaker obtained the recollections hundreds of years ago, against the boy’s will? 

The seams of the devil’s tailcoat split under his rumbling rage. His instability spiked, and a chill sparked in the hallway, burning along the walls and singeing the ceiling with the raw bite of deep space. There were too many things to consider, too many beings to punish. Over seven billion people on Earth to comb through, and those were the living ones. What of those that had already expired? Or those yet to be born? 

Undertaker smiled, extinguishing the bitter cold that had lapped at the ends of his silvered locks. “I told you,” he said matter-of-fact, “it’s best you forget about him, and find a new contractor.”

With that, he took his leave. 

The thunderclap of a snarl that Sebastian had been repressing issued from his throat and shattered the barrier. By the time he’d made it to the end of the hall, where Undertaker should have fled, the reaper was no longer there. His insult and outrage rose together in cataclysmic fury. His chest heaved, and his eyes glowed, illuminating the remnants of the double’s memories as he brought it up to his face to inspect it. 

_His young master’s bleary eyes opened with difficulty in near darkness. They were heavy with sleep, caught sight of his butler standing statuesque by his bedside holding a candelabrum and closed once more. A satisfied sigh escaped his lips and he turned over in his bed._

The memory had been but a blip in the earl’s lifespan. He doubted the little lord was even conscious of having experienced it! He groaned, crumpling the record and abandoning it along with the frozen remains of his doppelganger before pushing through the entrance of the final stairwell.

The shock that Finny was running full tilt down a set of stairs with him thrown bodily over his shoulder hadn’t registered in Ciel’s brain yet. It was his words that rung in his ears, an ill omen echoing in his head with the emphasis changing each time. _YOUR parents died here_ : implying that it was his fault. _Your parents died HERE_ : this is a dangerous place. _Your PARENTS died here_ : the people responsible for protecting you are gone. _Your parents DIED here_ : they're never coming back.

“S-s-stop!” he stuttered, being jostled by Finny’s every foot fall. “Stop! F-f-in-ny, I need answers.” 

When they finally got to the door that would lead them into the Horseguards’ lounge, the blond deposited his friend back onto his feet. “I get it. I do. There was a time when I wanted to know why some pretty shitty things had happened to me too.” He saw Ciel’s mouth open to speak and put his hand over it to stop him. “But knowing it didn’t help anything. It made me more upset. Entities aren’t meant to think rationally when they’re upset, Ciel.” 

Ciel scrunched his nose in befuddlement. “Entities?”

“ _People._ I’m just… I’m just stressed right now.” He put his ear to the door, and cursed, not so quietly, under his breath. “It’s too quiet. I don’t like it.” 

“It wasn’t exactly loud when I left. It’s a restaurant at a swanky hotel, Fin, not _Electric Brixton_.”

“I wish we were at Electric Brixton right now,” Finny muttered as his hand reached into his own back pocket and pulled out a pistol. Making sure it was loaded, he clicked the action back into place and gave it to Ciel. “Listen to me, I promise to tell you what I know, if you just do as I say, for once in your life.”

“What do you mean, ‘what you know’?” Ciel demanded, narrowing his eyes. “This is the second time tonight you come barreling in to --”

“Do I have your word or not?” Finny cut him off. “We can’t stay here all night.” He thrust the gun into Ciel’s unwilling grip and wrapped his fingers around the frame. “We can’t even stay here another two minutes.” 

There was dread in Finny’s usually stoic tone. Ciel could see it visibly too, the tension corded between his neck, his shoulders, his arms... He couldn’t recall a time in their life where Finny had ever shown any sign of fear. The Finny in his dreams, however, was different. He was bald. No, he had a shaved head, and always emerged from a manhole, clad in a hospital gown. Their eyes would meet, and Finny’s turquoise ones were relieved. But when they shifted to his right, they became aghast in terror, like a mouse having been found by a ravenous cat. 

“Fine. Whatever. Let’s just go,” Ciel pushed passed Finny, into the swinging door that acted as partition to the stairwell and gasped. 

The restaurant looked as though it had lived through extensive warfare. The few tables that had been there, occupied, were now overturned. The ceiling to floor drapery was shredded, likely by the windows that had shattered being blown in by some violent explosion that took place just outdoors. The shards of glass littered the floor, twinkling like stars fallen to earth; they directed Ciel’s attention skywards where they reflected their light upon the ceiling. 

He mouthed the words cast over the powdered rococo canopy, _‘who stole the candy from my tummy?’_ and a violent frisson rocked his lithe body. 

“Damn it, he must know you’re here,” Finny swore and acted at once as a human shield, leading him circuitously towards the front entrance. “Keep your face down.” 

“Who knows I’m here?” Ciel faltered, stumbling behind Finny. They took unnecessary shelter behind a large pillar as his friend peered /around it. “What candy? This isn’t for me…” 

“You don’t remember?” 

“I…”

“It’s better that you don’t. You shouldn’t remember any of this.” Finny told him, dragging him along. He hated being so exposed, but the thought of being up against the wall was too reminiscent of an execution.

They’d made it mid way, the crushing of debris under their feet sounding off like an alarm with every step they took. Ciel glanced over his shoulder instinctively when he heard a distinctive crunch that did not sound like shoes over glass. The man who was coming at them hadn’t seemed so large when he’d been sitting at a table. As it was, he stood well over two meters, and if anyone told Ciel that he had single-handedly destroyed the Horseguards lounge, he’d have believed them. 

Ciel barely had a chance to point his gun at him when he was hurled back by Finny. “Get behind the bar, and stay there!” 

Defiantly, Ciel found his balance and aimed for the man’s head. The giant of a man seemed unfazed by the threat, and if there was kindness in his features, Ciel could not see it. 

“Ciel! Get your ass behind the bar!” Finny ordered him again, the stranger still advancing on him. They were just over an arm's length apart and the smaller went bravely on the offensive, putting both of his hands on the man’s barreled chest. 

“I don’t want to hurt you gardener, get out of the way,” His accent was thick. German, Ciel thought. But not contemporary. It was a dialect he didn’t recognize. 

“Wolfram,” Finny hissed, followed by something nearly inaudible, and pushed against the large foreigner, making the gap between him and Ciel wider. “Why?” 

The man, Wolfram, growled, its sound inhuman. Not animal inhuman… like, monstrously inhuman. All of the tiny hairs on the back of Ciel’s neck stood at attention.

“I thought it was him, but I could not be sure with his mask. At least now we know two things for certain.” The beast pushed back, gaining no ground as his feet left scorch marks into the buckling carpet.

“What do you know?!” Ciel called despite himself, his feet carrying him closer to the action. 

A lupine grin stretched the taut mouth of the sideburned man. Something in Ciel’s voice, or perhaps it was his interest, seemed to please the attacker. “Kadar is a traitor, and you…” 

But whatever he was about to say was cut short. With a swift blow to the windpipe, Wolfram crumpled to the floor at Finny’s feet. The blond turned tail faster than he should have been allowed to and shook Ciel roughly. 

“I thought I told you to listen! I have one job! _One_. And you make it impossible for me to-” 

A bullet whizzed through the pair of them, abruptly splitting them up. Automatically, Ciel’s head whipped back to the supine figure on the floor, but Finny’s shot over his shoulder in the direction where the projectile had come. 

Ciel’s heart had barely enough time to beat once; he felt something searing just above his knee and the intensity of it toppled him into Finny. Air was sucked between his teeth and he squeezed the trigger, aiming the pistol over his friend’s shoulder. 

“No!” Finny barked, picking up a nearby table to absorb ammunition raining into the lounge at predictable five second increments. He hauled them over to the aforementioned bar, and they hid behind it. By the burning toxic green of his eyes, Ciel could tell he’d stretched Finny’s patience to the limit. “If I thought I could carry you out of here myself, I would knock you out this minute; but I’m not sure I can anymore, so for all that is… _holy_... please listen.”

Ciel saw a bullet pierce the thick oak surface of the table held by Finny and was struck by an ominous thought: if that shot had gone through, what of the others? He searched Finny’s chest, and abdomen for any sign of damage. He hadn’t finished his cursory inspection, when his chin was elevated to meet his friend’s face. “When I say you gotta go, you need to make a run for it.” 

They both looked down at Ciel’s bleeding leg, and up again. Had the situation not been so dire, they would have laughed; Ciel could barely run at the best of times. 

“Take my gun,” he offered with shaking hands; shock was settling in. Nausea roiled his guts and sweat misted his face. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, trying not to pay attention to his arrhythmia. 

“It won’t do me any good.” Finny waved off the gun. Never turning his back to Ciel, he positioned the table so that the way they’d snuck behind the bar was blocked from anyone’s view. He knew he’d been shot, and more than once. Each bullet had torn through his pristine white shirt, through his flesh, lodging themselves into bones and organs. Mouthful after mouthful, he swallowed the blood that came up, determined not to let Ciel see. 

“Who’s doing this? Does this have anything to do with that candy?” 

Finny swallowed again. “I hope not.” He looked up, pretending to gaze at the ceiling again and blinked the wetness from his eyes, a reflexive reaction to his human suffering. “That’s not something I ever want to revisit. If anything, whoever wrote it is trying to force you to remember.” Outside the blasted windows, the wind screeched. It was soon silenced by sharp heels touching down on the ravaged carpet. 

“Remember what?” Ciel winced, trying to crane his neck over the bar to see what imaginary sound had caught Finny’s attention. 

“Just remember… that I was a loyal servant, until the very end.” With that, Finny rose to his feet, and couldn’t help himself when he pat the older version of his young master on the head. 

Automatically, Ciel’s eyes closed under the weight of Finny’s touch, and they opened again once he heard Finny land on the other side of the counter. 

“You fancy yourself a renegade now?” a high-pitched female voice asked. 

Ciel’s attention was divided. With a part of his brain, he listened raptly to one gun being discarded and the click of a hammer being pulled back on a new one. Simultaneously, he focused on searching his bag for something to tourniquet his copiously bleeding wound whose blood had puddled beneath him. Coming up empty handed, he tore a strip of his jacket with his teeth, and tied it high on his thigh. In his dismay of the night’s events, he could barely register the pain it undoubtedly caused him - thank goodness for small miracles. 

“No, Mey-Rin. Our orders have always been to protect the young master. Naberius’ failure does not change this.” 

_Mey-Rin_? Ciel’s brain felt crammed, overloaded, like one more iota of information would short-circuit the whole thing. Already, it was giving him a headache; a faint, pulsing throb that flashed just behind his eyes. He was no neurologist, but he thought that it was gradually beating a barrier in his mind, a dam of sorts, where casual flickers of light were the norm, and the water that trickled out of the resulting cracks were images, or memories he’d been forced to repress. 

With blood flowing less auspiciously from his wound, Ciel could almost appreciate the subtle difference of his friend’s voice as he spoke. His reassuring timber had become grave, and, to Ciel’s surprise, it rattled him. He was tempted peek, to put a face to this _Mey-Rin_ , to see who had unnerved Finny to such a degree that his inflection had taken on a murderous quality. 

Peering through the gap between the bar and the table, his eyes fell first on the wolfish man sprawled on the floor, and he recalled his words about Kadar having been a traitor. 

He cursed the dead phone in his pocket and reached instead for the cordless one behind the bar. He didn’t know why it was important to warn his… _client_ , but he felt that he owed him that much. One after another, he dialed all the room numbers from the floor where Soma had gotten off. Each time he got a wrong number, he cursed himself. He cursed his curiosity and pigheadedness too! 

Why hadn’t he listened to Tanaka when the older man had told him that his parents had sacrificed much to keep him safe, and that some secrets deserved to die when their keepers did? 

Why did Ciel always think he knew better than Finny, who had opposed this whole evening from the get-go? And now, his own mulish obstinacy was likely going to get them both killed! 

He could hear the exchange just some tables away, and it chilled him to the bone, despite the burning sensation steadily climbing up his body.

Mey-Rin stopped five meters away from Finny. She daren’t approach any closer; if their match came down to a physical one, she would surely lose. Besides, the reaper’s bullets that she’d only just loaded into the custom, gold-inlaid Colt Paterson would do the job, it’s not as if she would miss. She hadn’t meant to kill the Phantomhive boy, only to slow him down, to return him to her master. 

“You idiot, it’s Naberius we serve, not the boy. Or have you forgotten your eons of imprisonment? We owe _him_ our allegiance for releasing us from those vases.” 

Ciel stilled his fingers over the phone’s numbers at the mention of _vases_. An anxious, familiar voice called his attention back to reality. “Ciel?”

“You need to get out, Soma. Now. A wolf is coming for you.” Ciel ended the call, not giving Soma the chance to reply. He couldn’t afford to. Both Finny, and Mey-Rin had stopped their conversing altogether. 

“Young master, allow me reunite you with your butler. I won’t even kill Finny if you come quick,” Mey-Rin proposed in what she deemed a fair trade. The boy always had a weak spot for the gardener. A little friend he was, or perhaps something closer to a brother...

“Ciel, don’t!” Finny warned with a growl. 

Behind the bar, Ciel was becoming disoriented, and dizzy. He wondered if he was falling victim to hypovolemic shock. Blood was still oozing from his wound, though not as fast. His trousers were wet and sticky with it. Who was this young master they spoke of? Was _he_ a young master? Master of what? Desolation? Duplicity? 

A gun went off. This one wasn’t nearly as quiet as the last, nor was the groan of pain he heard Finny lament. 

“Ciel, s-stay there...” Finny choked on the hurt stemming from his right shoulder. He looked at the wound that scorched the fabric of his shirt. Black vapour billowed at the edges, elongating the gash so that it was less spheroid in shape, and resembled the curve of a sickle. 

“He still goes by _that_ name? Really?” Mey-Rin criticized, pulling the trigger of the death scythe pistol again, this time aiming for Finny’s other shoulder. It stopped him dead in his tracks, and with the howl of agony he made, she was sure the boy would give in. She doubted he was any less proud now than he had been. Soon enough, he’d offer himself up as martyr. “You really got wrapped up in that game, you did...”

“I’m… I’m not the only one. S-so did _he_ ,” Finny sneered. He spat, and the substance from his mouth hit the floor with a dense, congealed splatter. A shot to his leg had him kneeling in the goop moments later, glowering at her from under his lashes. 

“Stop! Don’t hurt him anymore!” Ciel commanded, painfully hoisting himself up on one leg, clutching the bar for support. The woman didn’t turn her gun on him the way he’d thought she would, instead, she kept it marked on Finny’s heart. 

Mey-Rin faltered. 

It was ingrained in her to listen to her master’s contractor. Her hand had come down some, but refound its target just as quick. Her lips parted into a fond, appraising smile as she looked him over. “For some reason, I imagined a grown up version of you would have resembled the late- _late_ Vincent Phantomhive…” Her eyes stayed locked on his face, which bore features of striking nobility; she lingered on the piercing stare of his bicoloured eyes, his prominent cheekbones, and the sharp angles of his square jawline. “Not that this is bad. This is good, it is. _Very_ handsome. Not so slight. Oh, and he’s already ravenous, he is.”

“Whatever, just take me instead,” Ciel beseeched, hobbling around the ledge of the bar, willing himself not to look at Finny and the extent of his injuries. He pushed the table that barred his path with quite a bit of difficulty. Lightheadedness was settling in, and he was blinking slowly, trying to grasp why he hadn’t been shot yet. Maybe this woman wouldn’t hurt him, after all. Maybe he’d get answers if he went with her. 

Mey-Rin sidestepped the blond, her heels making divots in the lounge floors as she walked toward her former charge, one hand extended towards him. Once she delivered him to Sebastian, this whole ordeal could be put to rest. She would no longer have anyone to call master: not Solomon, not Naberius. Her freedom was almost as palpable on her tongue as Ciel’s self-sacrifice. 

“Ciel, no.” Finny’s voice was low, a rumble felt, more than words heard. He turned towards them, dragging himself with his clawed fingers and tearing his wounds along the whole length of his body in so doing. They ate away at him little by little, spreading like a veiled pellicle, darkening his arms, his legs, and up his neck. The edges of his vision blurred, and the midnight sangui that glazed his cornea depicted the not-so-young master in bruised hues. Keeping his human form was a near impossibility at this point. It would be easier if he could just… and then he could get Ciel out of here... 

“Don’t even think about it, Finny.” It wasn’t a warning, but a threat; for when her former servant-mate managed to rear himself up onto his knees, she didn’t so much as glance back before shooting him point blank in the chest, and stuffing the pistol roughly back in its holster.

Finny’s cry was one of deafening silence; and in his muddled upset, all Ciel could think about was how wrong that Alien movie tagline had been. Somebody _HAD_ to hear you scream in space. Though his agony lay mute, Ciel was sure that somewhere far away, someone could hear Finny. 

Ciel scrambled forward, staggering over the table and falling on it to free himself. “Fuck… No. Finny...” he muttered, deliriously disturbed, “no, no, no…” 

With a force stronger than should have been allowed for such a petite woman, Ciel was lifted to his feet by the back of his shirt. Mey-Rin held him firmly in place so that he could not take any further steps.

“Finny! _Finny!_ Get up!” 

Ciel didn’t know what he was saying. There was absolutely no logic in his request. The blond had been shot numerous times, he himself had seen the final blow, and yet, he still expected the gardener to get up. 

_When had he ever had a gardener?_

The only answer he came to, of course, was when he had a maid. He struggled, half-mad against her now, glowering with only his right eye streaming with tears, and a violet tint shadowing his vision with an image that could not belong to him. This couldn’t be Mey-Rin. Where had her glasses gone? Thick, round and opaque, made just for her to blend in. Where was her maid’s outfit stricken with gore from a fight that had eviscerated the Manor, burying the staff… _his_ staff. His gardener. 

Finny was more than just twitching fingers and a cracked skull under a pile of slabbed stones this time around. He was _there_ , on the lounge floor within arm’s reach. But she no more let Ciel go now, than she had in the past. 

_“I can’t let you,” she had crooned in his ear, as he clutched a mangled straw hat drenched in brain matter to his chest, “it’s not safe. Sebastian said to keep you safe, for him…”_

Ciel felt his heels slide against the floor as he was being dragged away by Mey-Rin, heading to the rear of the lounge, and bypassing an unconscious Wolfram. He could see Finny still breathing, saw his bullet-strewn back rise and fall with every laboured breath he took. Not dead…

_Yet._

Desperate in his need to reach his friend, Ciel ignored the gun stowed in his back pocket, favouring the one in Mey-Rin’s holster. The fact that it had not been secured might have been the only stroke of luck he’d had this evening. Without another thought, he positioned the barrel under his own chin. 

“Let me go right now, or I swear to god, I’ll pull the trigger,” he threatened. “Try me, bitch. I’ve had a rough night, and this would bring it to an end.” 

Whether she believed him, or she was afraid to fail whatever master she served, she finally released. He stepped away from her, limping badly, knowing full well that she could overtake him at any point. She smiled a razored smile, and Ciel thought that she was putting him on, that she was about to give chase like a fox to a rabbit; but when she moved, it was towards the window. Debris was falling from the sky, some of it screaming as it pelted down. 

“He’s coming, my lord,” she announced, sapped by her exasperation, “any minute now.”

Though Ciel only had eyes for Finny, and was not looking in her direction, he could hear her exhaustion, and her age, which he thought did not match her appearance. 

It was a good thing that he kept his friend in sight, because soon enough, Finny’s head raised mere centimeters from the floor while Mey-Rin busied herself with the spectacle outside. 

“Go,” Finny mouthed, humanity draining from his flesh. 

“No.” Ciel said for what must have been the millionth time that evening. He lowered his gun to free both his hands. He had to get Finny out into the streets… it’s likely where the guests and the hotel attendants had vacated. How could anyone have failed to notice the violence that had taken place at the Royal Horseguards? There would be officers, ambulances. There was barely twenty meters separating them from the help that they both needed. 

_He could do this._

“Stay!” Mey-Rin ordered him, as if he were a dog. She came at him with such speed, that he knew the impact alone would shatter his bones. 

His pupils hadn’t yet dilated when a silver blur collided with her red one. Sound waves ejected from the impact, blowing Ciel back, and slamming him hard onto the floor. He clung fast to Finny, and though his head was swimming, he pushed against him, on his knees towards the front of the lounge. He budged, but only in the slightest, most painful millimeters due to the friction of the carpet. 

A kind, firm hand tugged on his bicep. How Ciel even heard him over the crash and growls that echoed and reverberated in the room, he would never know. 

“Ciel, come now, we have to leave him.” 

In the moment that it took for Ciel to spy Tanaka shielding him, Finny had drawn his last breath. 

He shook his head in protest and croaked, “Take him. Take Finny. I’ll follow.” Ciel wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but he didn’t want to leave Finny here to his fate. What he had mistaken for sterling light had been Snake, and he was engaged in some kind of combat with Mey-Rin. Ciel convinced himself that he’d reached a delusional state of shock since both figures fought like devils: dancing, their feet barely touching the floor, and spinning so inhumanly fast. There was the subtle crunch of bones breaking, snapping, but he couldn’t tell who’d been hurt. 

Behind them, he saw Wolfram stir, and so did Tanaka. 

“Please, Gramps,” Ciel supplicated, attributing the never-before-used sobriquet to his impending unconsciousness. 

The man hardly looked old enough to have a child Ciel’s age. He’d have been a perfect replacement for Daniel Craig as Bond; even-tempered, able-bodied, debonaire, and in his forties. The look he gave his young charge vacillated somewhere between pity and responsibility.

“I’m afraid I cannot, Bocchan.” 

Ciel opened his mouth to argue again, but was instead met with a quick jab behind the neck.

It had taken much longer than she had predicted, but when the doors to the elevator opened with a pneumatic hiss, the banshee fell out, clutching her neck with both hands. She’d been sent to warn them, those huddled cowards in the penthouse suite, but she knew it would amount to nothing. They couldn’t escape his wrath any more than she could give caution. What that demon had done to her was more than a slight, worse than defilement: it was depredation of the most perverted kind. Her fear of him would have been enough to keep her throat closed, but the soulsucker thought it fit not only to destroy the muscles, vessels, and bones that made up the integrity of her neck, but to also deny the right that had been hers upon death to shriek and wail, by ripping out her vocal cords.

She staggered to the giant oak doors at the end of the hall, and fell into them with a thud.

Nobody answered. 

She could hear them, scuttling about. She could feel them slamming furniture up against the door to barricade it. They were hissing, and something was singeing. Glass shattered and water was spilled to a chorus of soothing intonations. 

Crying, the banshee sank to her knees, tears silently careening down her face. One fist banged relentlessly against the echoing wood. _He’s coming! He’s coming!_ she pronounced, lips pressed ardently under the gold handle, upon the keyhole. Only wet gurgling and gasps for air made their useless way out. 

The door tucked away in the far corner near the elevator opened. Her fear turned to terror, her outraged alerts into mute, shameless begging. _Let me in! God! Let me in!_ she repined shamelessly. She’d not spoken _His_ name in centuries, but she was above her own pride now. Anything that would save her soul, that would prevent her from spending an eternity in the demon’s churning guts was in her good graces. 

When the demon stood behind her, when she felt the violence of his aura on her back, she shut her eyes, and her lips and tongue rolled over the soundless words of a prayer that she’d learned as a wee lass: _I summon today, all these powers between me and those evils, against every cruel and merciless power that may oppose my body and soul._

It was the crunch of the handle being torn clean of the door that interrupted her meditation. She watched as he pulverized it in his large, gloved hand until it was the size of a walnut. 

“The only thing between you and Evil is choice, my dear,” the demon crooned pitifully, offering her the gold nugget. “And unlike your god, the devil is gracious enough to extend it.” 

Never looking at him, she took the offering. With trembling fingers, she stuffed the gold, that was any banshees’ undoing, into the gash of her throat and felt it burn a path down to her core, where abruptly, it corroded and turned her to dust. 

Sebastian pushed the hillock of dirt aside with his Oxfords, which, despite the amount of gore he’d experienced in the Naberius, managed to remain untarnished. With the handle absent from the door, he merely pushed against it. There was some give, maybe a couple of centimeters, but no more than that. From behind the barricade, an acerbic vapour seeped out, smelling of home, and it beckoned the xenomorphs. 

They growled their impatience and the demon sighed his own. Initially, he had intended to reach the top floor of the Naberius because he desired answers. Now that he was there, he was loathe to admit that it had been a waste of time. He felt no power emanating from the Penthouse; whomever was holed up was as inconsequential as the banshee had been. 

Only one thing mattered since the elevator: leaving the hotel and claiming his prey. The weight of failure was too heavy a burden, even for one such as himself. It weakened him, made him fallible, _human_. 

Disgust shuddered his frame. His little master’s words, once so certain and cynical, were now taunting as the demon recalled them. In his mind’s eye, he saw a twelve-year old earl in his nightshirt, sat upon the ledge of the bay window inside of his chamber, reading by candlelight. The bags under his eyes were pronounced; the conclusion to the disappearances related to the Noah’s Arc Circus had eroded his tranquility in both his waking hours, and those that were meant to be dedicated to sleep. 

His young master cradled the Milton book in one hand and flattened the pages with the other. He held it close to his nose, to better make out the words, and whispered them to himself when they were particularly revelatory:

 _“Me miserable! Which way shall I fly_  
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?  
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;  
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,  
Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,  
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.” 

At the time, Sebastian had felt endeared by the recital of _Paradise Lost_ , even proud. The earl, so young, yet so noble in the acceptance of his fate, viewed himself as a fallen creature. 

_Delicious_. 

But now, the demon understood his misattribution; the pretty prose had not comforted the young man, rather, it had confirmed his disgrace. And though dimensions separated them, and they were a breed apart, demon and lord were tied inexplicably through scorn. 

He was more than keen to shed that bitter sentiment and redeem himself. 

So were his pets, who tore through the oak doors as if they were fog. The floors were sodden with water, a poor attempt at diluting the caustic radiation of a singularity. 

The room’s occupants were not visible right away; they were clustered together on a table in an alcove. Four of them. A kelpie escaped from her tank by the smell of it; she had taken on the appearance of the infamous _Robin_. Her rose dress was soaked, and her long slate hair was littered with water weeds. Her hooves remained visible though, and ruined the illusion altogether. Crowding the spirit was a siren, and a severe looking reaper with short hair, brandishing a hedge trimmer. 

It was the one at the back that interested him the least. He hid behind all of them, a little, coprophagic parasite whose small, watery eyes darted about like flies. A new reaper, more dastardly now than in the life he’d abandoned. 

The xenomorphs waded the toxic haze, their forms increasing with the absorption of it. They were sharks in a frenzy, circling them, nipping at their feet to tease them. Their cavernous rumbles were laughter, and the demon felt it, but did not share in their glee. 

“I’ll be frank with you,” Sebastian spoke with all the dignity of an aristocratic butler, “I am not at all in the mood to endure any pitiful bargaining, and, or sniveling. I require two things: the cinematic records stored within the reapers, and an exit.” 

The Robin-kelpie opened her mouth, and the demon rolled his eyes dramatically, pawing the inside of his jacket at his right breast. 

“See here, _Collapsar_ , we’ve done nothing wr--”

“Where are they…” Sebastian muttered over her plea, switching to his left side. The huddled group looked at him both expectantly and indignantly.

“I said...” 

“Not silver bullets, though I’m sure they will suffice. They always have. Ah, here they are,” he cut her off again, but permanently this time. One after the other, three sterling knives made for her head, knocking it back into the siren as they hit mouth, and eyes. She fell at their feet, and his pets reached for her, dragging her into the fog like the downed hands of the River Styx. She did not resurface when they backed away, but the loyal creatures returned him his weapons. 

“I did give you fair warning that I was in no mood,” Sebastian shrugged. 

“If we give you the records, we expire,” Ludger explained. 

“And?” Sebastian asked, indifferent. “Is that not what you wanted? You fancy doing this until some Unknown deems your punishment adequate?” 

Ludger exchanged a look with the short reaper, then with the siren. “Not especially. But I have no inclination to perish at the hands of a gluttonous soul sucker either.” 

Sebastian made a face much like his young master did when presented with poached fish. The corners of his mouth turned down in revulsion. “You flatter yourself indeed, if you believe that I have such boorish tastes.” 

“I can’t believe you, Ludger!” The siren’s voice shook with resentment, but her mannerisms did not match her theatrics. There was nothing demeaning her stance, no foot stomping, no accusatory glare. "Do reapers have any loyalty at all?"

Sebastian could all but see the cogs turning in her head; the duplicitous siren was hoping to change her allegiance to save her own skin. "I daresay they do not, harpy. Just a moment ago, the Manager himself sold them out." 

The young reaper's eyes widened, and it amused Sebastian. Why was it that beings were so shocked by the deplorable behavior of others, when they themselves were guilty of exhibiting the same low morality? "This comes as a surprise to you, does it, neonate? Shall we test the hypothesis, then?” The devil strode across the room to the floor-to-ceiling window that had already been damaged, and took a seat mid-air, supported suspiciously by the lengthening of his newly animated tailcoat. His long fingers were steepled before his face as he considered the trio. “Whom amongst you shall be next to succumb to death? I will allow you to select that _fortuitous_ individual, but no talking; the game loses its appeal that way.” Sebastian withdrew his watch from his pocket, and popped it open for effect. “Oh, and do make haste, or the choice will be mine.” 

How obscene, how perfectly childish; his young master would have approved. He and the earl would have bantered about it, hedged their bets loudly to upset the participants unnecessarily. Inside his breast pocket, he felt the sapphire burn, and clutched it against his non-existent heart through the material. _Soon_ , he uttered soundlessly, and it was his stomach that gave an almighty lurch in response. 

The siren and both reapers sized one another up. The outcome was obvious enough; the small reaper refused to make eye contact with the siren, and the one named _Ludger_ looked at her apologetically. 

“It seems as though reapers _do_ have a shred of loyalty, after all,” Sebastian acknowledged. He turned his head slightly so that his profile was recognizable beyond the jagged glass and whistled. The sound could not be registered by the inhabitants of the room, though they clutched their ears all the same. 

In the time that it took for the small reaper to retch and wipe his mouth, a small hoard of sluagh that had been circling the dark skies in search of sustenance broke through the remaining windows. They had been waiting for such an invitation, and were not fussed by whom was granting it. Taking their directive from the demon, five spirits of restless death converged onto the table, seizing the one that was pushed forward. They made for the others, but stopped when the xenomorphs growled. 

For her part, the siren laughed seductively, her mouth stretching from one ear to the other. Scarlet, scaled wings manifested from her back and opened wide to take flight. “Sluagh? Truly Collapsar, I’m touched. Is this compassion? You’re old enough to realize my kind is part _aves_...”

Sebastian tsked condescendingly, cocking his head, “But what is a sparrow when compared to a hawk?” 

The sluagh’s fingers cut into the siren like sharp talons, two of them rushing her to the open air. They leapt from the casement and immediately tore into her, clipping her wings, fighting for limbs and torso and mocking her. The cries that burst from her lips gathered more of the murderous waifs to her suffering. They let her fall from great heights, but never touch down, preferring to break her bones themselves. 

The three sluaghs who’d remained behind, added to the chaos by dumping tables and chairs, shelves and pictures from the ninth floor. The objects disappeared from sight once they cleaved the barrier that separated the Naberius and the Horseguards. 

“And then there were two,” Sebastian hummed. 

But not for long. Hiding behind Ludger, the cowardly little reaper thrust his bulb auger death scythe through the taller man. The spur bypassed the spine and dug into the soft, fleshy organs in a corkscrew fashion. 

Ludger was still gaping in shock when the small reaper kicked his mentor forward to dislodge his weapon. The hedge trimmer clattered to the floor before its owner. 

His curled lip and skyward stare should have alerted the remaining reaper of the demon’s displeasure. Still, Sebastian genuflected to retrieve the fitful record that was his former master’s, struggling to get out from under the corpse. He weighed the substantial strip in both hands before pocketing it; this one required all his attention. Its cumbersome clout promised a sizeable return of emotional bedlam and he was greedy enough to want to savour every sorrowed note on his own. 

What he did _not_ want was to keep being pecked at by a trembling assailant that had the moral turpitude of a gnat. He caught the auger the fourth time it came down on his shoulder and tossed it out the window. 

Normally, death scythes hurt just about any entity, but the severity of the injury had more to do with the perspicacity behind the reaping. He lacked it, that sort of wise, knowing determination. At best, all this tiny sociopath could muster was righteous self-preservation. 

The demon rose. His height was not the artificial human guise he used to maintain a butler’s aesthetic. He filled the space, head brushing the ceiling so that it was tilted towards its prey. 

Max recoiled from the impending darkness, wincing as he backed up slowly, stupidly expecting the demon to show him mercy after having assisted him, however meager his part was. 

“You must have been disappointed,” Sebastian simpered, poised to spring. 

“W-when?” 

“When no one mourned your passing,” he snickered. He could not smell it on the contemptible knave. The grief of loved ones usually clung to their departed like the whale excrement they used as a base for Victorian perfumes. Max was all but scentless, if one ignored the envy and weakness coming off him. “All for attention, was it not? A self-slaughter gone wrong?” He yanked the young reaper’s arm towards himself and pushed up his sleeve. “Ah yes,” he smoothed over the scar with this thumb, “hit the wrong vessel. I suppose you believed yourself a physician of sorts to be able to tell the difference?”

Max jerked his arm back. His lips moved, but nothing came out. His eyes pricked but they were muted like his mouth. 

Sebastian’s face was centimeters from his prey, breathing loathsomely upon his anguished face. “You’ve failed to learn a vital lesson: as a human, you were not nearly as important as you thought you were. Likewise, you have demonstrated little to no value as a reaper.” To drive the point home, he thought back to his earlier encounter with Undertaker. “Comparatively speaking, even a bizarre doll was tasked with housing a more significant memory than you were.” 

Max thought back to the simplicity of the earl walking into a ballroom, trying to convince himself that the moment had meaning. There were so many people, the place itself was so opulent. “It was an important event!” he said, finally finding his voice. 

“The only thing of import was _him_ ,” Sebastian growled, pouncing on the reaper, both of them catching wind as they hurtled out of the window. 

The air whipped their hair in their faces as they plummeted in a downward spiral. Tendrils aflame whirled behind them, scorching the night, and Sebastian could see his ghastly reflection in the reaper’s terrified eyes. 

Precipitously, he changed his mind. He would share the memory with this wretch, let him see that with which he would never amount to. 

Ludger’s record was withdrawn from the demon’s pocket and held firmly between them. The edges disintegrated inwards as they plunged, melding together and taking the shape of the memory so that it was played out like a stardusted slide projection.

_Click_

Darkness. 

_Click_

A spotlight on a ruined body, presumably male, frail, and strewn amidst others. 

_Click_

That damned lifeless hand, again, adorned with blue sapphire on the thumb. It shoots out, reaching.

_Click_

Him.

_Click_

His mouth is slack, but he’s moaning in agony. 

_Click_

He calls the devil’s name. He can see the word form on his bruised and bloodied lips. 

_Click_

Sebastian turns his young master on his back. The boy’s ribs are bulging beneath his jacket at odd angles.

_Click_

He’s too late. The earl’s pulse is slowing, fading. 

_Click_

He’s too late. His heartbeat hiccups under the demon’s hand. 

_Click_

He’s too late. His warmth drains into the ground beneath him. 

_Click_

The boy saves whatever strength he has to scowl at the demon. 

_Click_

His eyes become glossy orbs whose forget-me-not irises reflect the blossoming of stars overhead. 

_Click_

Mortem. A demon cradling its prey.

_Click_

A contract not honoured. A promise broken. An earl unprotected. Betrayed. Mortem. 

_Click_

A demon regaining his senses. Contracts are but a formality. The soul is still his to claim. There is greed in many of his eyes. Starvation in the throb of his aura. 

_Click_

A collapsar’s teeth bite down on a butler’s glove and pull. There are no fingers, but onyx wisps of an event horizon. 

_Click_

Tenebrosity befalls the last of Solomon’s heirs. He’s wrapped in a vortex of darkness softer than silk, more violent than a collision of galaxies. It arches the young man’s back as it pulls the brightness from within up and up. He’s no longer a young master, but a marionette whose strings the demon now commands. 

_Click_

The demon licks his chops, and he snaps, snaps, snaps all of the threads that tether the soul to the body. 

_Click_

It’s large. Much too large for such a little lord. He brings the soul to his maws and stays afloat in the rippling darkness of the demon’s eager hands. A taste. So hungry. Ravenous. Insatiable. His tongues lash and flick at his meal like solar flares lapping the earth. It turns the soul’s luminosity into obscurity. Fills his aeonian voids with one mouthful. 

_Click_

Darkness. 

_Click_

Solum. 

_Click_

Solum. 

_Click_

Solum.

_Click_

No more Game for the vagrant demon. 

_Click_

He heaves and retches, body bowed, pressure on his guts. Voracity returns with a vengeance not even he has the nerve to devise. And he’s --- 

_Click, Click, Click, Click, Click_

It didn’t matter what he was...

The images may have withered and wilted, and the reaper’s body might have kissed the concrete terrace of the Royal Horseguards, breaking it in undulations under the weight of gravity and the demon himself. 

But as they had fallen, he’d caught a glimpse of eyes like wet, swollen pulsars. So potent were their allure that they’d driven even his own demise from interest. He sought them out, claws gouging the historical building as he turned the corner and saw them again. They belonged not to his young master, but a grown man, being carried away from the hotel against his will by former Phantomhive servants.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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